Reviews’ length and sentiment as correlates of online reviews’ ratings

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify and validate reviews’ length and sentiment as correlates of online reviews’ ratings; and second, to understand the emotions embedded in online reviews and how they associate with specific words used in such reviews. Design/methodology/approach A panel data set of customer reviews was collected for auto, life, and home insurance from January 2012 to December 2015 using a web scraping technique. Using a sentiment analysis approach, 1,584 reviews for the auto, home, and life insurance services of 156 insurance companies were analyzed. Findings The results indicate that, since 2013, consumers have generally had more negative emotions than positive ones toward insurance services. The results also show that consumer review sentiment correlates positively and review length correlates negatively with consumer online review ratings. Furthermore, a two-way ANOVA analysis shows that, in general, short reviews with positive sentiment are associated with high review ratings. Practical implications The findings of this study provide service companies, in general, and insurance companies, in particular, with important guidelines that should be considered to increase consumers’ positive attitude toward their services. Originality/value This paper highlights the importance of sentiment analysis in identifying consumer reviews’ emotions and understanding the associations and interactions of reviews’ length and sentiment on online review rating, which can lead to improved marketing strategies.

Sentiment analysis of consumer reviews – a comparison of organic and regular food products usage

“…The current findings are in line with earlier works, where it is proved that longer reviews are often associated with better product performances (Ghasemaghaei et al, 2018), and the sentiment scores may be used as a proxy to measure the satisfaction (Al-Otaibi et al, 2018).…”

“…The research work on the review length establishes the relationship with the content quality (Hu et al, 2008). Later, another research work on review length establishes its relationship with sentiment scores (Ghasemaghaei et al, 2016). The review length is not an important factor in predicting the helpfulness of the review (Prakash et al, 2016).…”

“…Review length is related with content quality (Hu et al, 2008), star rating (Baek et al, 2012) and product performance (Prakash et al, 2016). Review length is capable of affecting the helpfulness of the review (Prakash et al, 2016) and sentiments in the messages (Ghasemaghaei et al, 2016). Thus, we expect the review length will affect the sentiment scores.…”

The interaction effect of online review language style and product type on consumers’ purchase intentions

“…Online reviews have become the focus of academic research, and the main research contents include three parts. Firstly, research on the emotion of online reviews gives priority to emotional tendency, emotional polarity, and emotional categorization (e.g., Shi et al, 2018;Ghasemaghaei et al, 2018). Through a crawler of online user reviews from 156 insurance companies, Ghasemaghaei et al (2018) found that consumers' review sentiment was positively correlated with online review ratings, while review length had negative correlation with online review ratings.…”

“…Firstly, research on the emotion of online reviews gives priority to emotional tendency, emotional polarity, and emotional categorization (e.g., Shi et al, 2018;Ghasemaghaei et al, 2018). Through a crawler of online user reviews from 156 insurance companies, Ghasemaghaei et al (2018) found that consumers' review sentiment was positively correlated with online review ratings, while review length had negative correlation with online review ratings. Secondly, some studies concentrate upon the perceived usefulness of online reviews (e.g., Hassanein and Head, 2007;Mudambi and Schuff, 2010).…”