Toward consumer perception of cellphones sustainability: A social media analytics

Today, sustainability is among the key considerations for company strategy and marketing efforts, especially large and established technology companies with short product life-spans. Companies often provide sustainability agendas that focus on the social, environmental and economic dimensions, also known as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) of sustainability. Social media provides a trove of evidence on how customers perceive and discuss the sustainability efforts of companies, which companies further utilize to understand and modify their efforts. In this study, we utilize Social Media Analysis to understand the perception of consumers towards sustainability efforts of two major companies in the mobile phone industry. We suggest a dictionary-based framework, including Content analysis, Descriptive Analysis and Sentiment analysis to extract the features that correspond to the three dimensions of TBL. Findings indicate that Environment, Material, Technology and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are among the key topics that customers are interested in. Results of Content analysis and Sentiment analysis indicate that companies differ in terms of perceptions along the TBL dimensions, with company 1 perceived better on environmental dimension, whereas, company 2 is perceived better on social and economic dimensions. We demonstrate how knowledge from user-generated data help understand and improve their supply chain. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.