Ge Ruichen, Zhao Hong, Zhang Sha
School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Front Artif Intell. 2022 Jul 18;5:900775. doi: 10.3389/frai.2022.900775. eCollection 2022.
There is a trend that customers increasingly join the online brand community. However, evidence shows that there are nuances between different user segments, and only a small group of users are active. Thus, one key concern marketers face is identifying and targeting specific segments and decreasing user churn rates in an online environment. To this end, this study aims to propose a UGC-based segmentation of online brand community users, identify the characteristics of each segment, and consequently reduce online brand community users' churn rate. We used python to obtain users' post data from a well-known online brand community in China between July 2012 and December 2019, resulting in 912,452 posts and 20,493 users. We then use text mining and clustering methods to segment the users and compare the differences between the segments. Three groups-information-oriented users, entertainment-oriented users, and multi-motivation users-were emerged. Our results imply that entertainment-oriented users were the most active, yet, multi-directional users have the lowest probability of churn, with a churn rate of only 0.607 times than that of users who focus either on information or entertainment. Implications for marketing and future research opportunities are discussed.
有一种趋势是客户越来越多地加入在线品牌社区。然而，有证据表明不同用户群体之间存在细微差别，只有一小部分用户活跃。因此，营销人员面临的一个关键问题是在在线环境中识别和定位特定群体，并降低用户流失率。为此，本研究旨在提出一种基于用户生成内容（UGC）的在线品牌社区用户细分方法，识别每个细分群体的特征，从而降低在线品牌社区用户的流失率。我们使用Python从2012年7月至2019年12月期间中国一个知名在线品牌社区获取用户的帖子数据，共得到912,452条帖子和20,493名用户。然后，我们使用文本挖掘和聚类方法对用户进行细分，并比较各细分群体之间的差异。出现了三个群体——信息导向型用户、娱乐导向型用户和多动机用户。我们的结果表明，娱乐导向型用户最活跃，然而，多向用户的流失概率最低，其流失率仅为专注于信息或娱乐的用户的0.607倍。文中还讨论了对营销的启示以及未来的研究机会。
