Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Online Review Mining: Health and Environmental Concerns on Beauty Products

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Abstract

Scholars in advertising, communication, marketing, and public relations have used various text-mining techniques to assess sentiments about brands, social issues, products, and policies. Introducing large-scale text analysis as its method, this study investigated the trend of consumers' interests or concerns over beauty products, focusing on health and environmental issues. A dataset of 249,152 reviews by 177,345 Amazon users on around 75,000 beauty products during the 2004-2013 period was analyzed for this study. The most frequently used words were "natural", "healthy", and "chemical". However, contrary to our expectation, beauty product consumers did not demonstrate much interest in health or environmental concerns. The main topics of the reviews did not center on health or environmental interests; they were mostly dedicated to the descriptions of product, price, delivery, and satisfaction. These findings can help scholars obtain a better understanding of consumer perception and behavior on beauty products related to health and environment issues.

How to Cite:

Ma, Y. & Kim, J., (2017) “Online Review Mining: Health and Environmental Concerns on Beauty Products”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 74(1).