What Are the Salient and Memorable Green-Restaurant Attributes? Capturing Customer Perceptions From User-Generated Content

Abstract

This study aims to survey user-generated content (UGC) from diners in certified green restaurants, discover the green images they recall, and demonstrate the usefulness of applying a probabilistic topic model to comprehend customers’ perceptions. Postvisit online reviews (N = 28,098), in the form of unstructured texts from the TripAdvisor.com website, were used to find freely recalled green-restaurant images. These data were preprocessed with a structural topic model (STM) algorithm to select 51 relevant categories of images. These image categories were compared with the findings of previous studies to discover unique restaurant attributes. Furthermore, a topic-level network and a green-restaurant network were drawn to discover the most easily recallable image categories and their attributes. This machine-learning-based approach improved the reproducibility of unstructured data analyses, overcoming the subjectivity of qualitative data analysis. Theoretical and practical implications are offered for topic modeling methodology along with marketing strategies for restaurateurs.