Linguistic distinctions in customer reviews can reveal the role we play in the purchase

What is it about?

Online shopping has become quite an essential part of our life. To make a choice, we often rely on product reviews, which narrate the experiences of shoppers like us. In turn, we post reviews to share our thoughts about the products we bought. Our feedback can relate to our own experiences as users or to the experiences of family and friends if we bought the product for them. This paper studies the differences between these two experience types in Amazon reviews of assistive technology such as reading aids. The authors examine a range of linguistic features covering the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and more. They pay particular attention to the communicative functions of those features, for instance, the use of adjectives like light or heavy to evaluate the product compared to the use of adjectives like thrilled or disappointed to express the user’s attitude to the experience. It turns out that reviewers tell their story differently depending on the role they play in the experience. When the product is for the purchaser’s own use, they come with preconceptions as to what the functionality should be like and how they want to use it. Such reviews are full of details on the product and evaluate the product’s worth in light of its cost. On the contrary, when the product is for somebody else, the purchaser typically hopes to make that person happy and does not have well-defined expectations. So, these reviews focus more on the user of the product – what are their needs? How do they feel about the product? Does the product meet those needs?

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Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The idea that different stakeholders in a purchase have different needs has been expressed elsewhere. While intuitively reasonable, it has not been systematically examined before. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically test and confirm this assumption. Moreover, it explicitly connects the differing needs in the different experience types to the way the product is ultimately evaluated. On the methodological side, the study adds to the yet small body of cases for how a linguistic analysis of customer feedback can provide insights for practitioners in business, medical care, or education.

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