InternationalJournalofHospitalityManagement84(2020)102317

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International Journal of Hospitality Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhm

Mapping hotel brand positioning and competitive landscapes by text-mining user-generated content

Feng Hua,b, Rohit H. Trivedic,⁎

a Xingzhi College, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, 31004, China

b University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

c University of Bradford, Emm Lane, Bradford, BD9 4JL, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:

Brand positioning Competitive landscape Repertory grid analysis Text mining

User-generated content

A B S T R A C T

This study uncovers hotel brand positioning and competitive landscape mapping by text-mining user-generated content (UGC). Rather than relying on a single dimension of consumer evaluation, the current study detects brand attributes by using both customer preferences as well as perceptual performance to develop meaningful insights. For this, the study combines content analysis and repertory grid analysis (RGA) to answer three key research issues. 111,986 hotel reviews from two biggest Chinese cities are used to explore and visualize the competitive landscape of six selected hotel brands across three hotel categories. Findings from the study will not only advance the existing literature on brand positioning and competitive landscape mapping but also help practitioners in developing brand positioning strategies to fight competitors within and across hotel categories.

Introduction

In the hospitality industry, building a strong hotel brand positioning requires more than just associating a property with a name and a logo or creating a marketing campaign (Cai and Hobson, 2004). In order to create a unique and differentiated hotel brand positioning, marketer need to develop a strategy that not only relates to the needs of the consumers (Choi and Chu, 2001; Oh and Parks, 1997) but also differ- entiate the property and value proposition meaningfully from other competing hotels in the same market (Park et al., 1986). A hotel can create unique positioning based on a set of differentiated attributes, targeting a specific user group/s or for a specific usage category (Brown and Ragsdale, 2002; Lewis, 1985). In any case, a unique brand posi- tioning will result into not only higher occupancy, repeat visit and service patronage, but also increased profitability and relative re- siliency during down industry cycle. Thus, it is perennially important for a marketer to understand how to uniquely position a specific hotel

brand by deploying a judicious mix of most appropriate resources and

communicating message that resonate to a specific consumer segment (Brown and Ragsdale, 2002; Dev et al., 1995; Park et al., 1986). An additional critical issue facing hotel looking for a strong brand posi- tioning is to distant itself from other competitors by offering and communicating unique tangible and intangible benefits that are diffi- cult for a competitors to copy (Anderson et al., 1999).

To this effect, it is necessary to examine the hotel brand positioning

from consumersrsquo; perspective and examine the performance of various competing hotels in a market so as to achieve a clear positioning with strong market orientation (Plumeyer et al., 2017). Previous literature in hospitality industry commonly explored hotel brand positioning and competitive landscape issues by either using survey data (e.g., Brown and Ragsdale, 2002; Dev et al., 1995) limiting the insights to pre-spe- cified questions or mining UGC with reliance on a single dimension of consumer evaluations (e.g., Chiu et al., 2015; Krawczyk and Xiang, 2016). The conventional survey-based techniques are characterized by an inherently high dependence on relatively small samples with in- formation selectivity bias and thus believed relatively weak in re- flecting holistic customer experience (Krawczyk and Xiang, 2016; Lau et al., 2005). On other hand, recent studies employing large size UGC largely limited the inquiry to a unidimensional evaluation of consumer opinion on detected brand attributes on importance (e.g., Krawczyk and

Xiang, 2016) or perceptual performance (Chiu et al., 2015) offering

implications that are lopsided with limited practical usability in brand positioning/repositioning decisions (Keller, 1993; Lewis, 1985). Ac- cording to the Expectancy Confirmation Theory (ECT) introduced by Oliver (1980), customer evaluation is the result of comprehensive comparison between customer expectation and perception and both of them should be used to under

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