Professional v. Amateur reviewers: What does their language actually tell us? : A Descriptive Text Analysis of Early Adopters

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to find and categorize differences in the language used inonline reviews by early adopters. By filling this gap in knowledge, marketers can betterunderstand the nature of an online review, be it derived from professional or amateurearly adopters. These categorizations aim to pinpoint differences between professionalsand amateur reviewers who are considered to be early adopters of technology. Publiclyavailable third-party data was analysed using a descriptive text analysis tool, LIWC(Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). The results regarding the professionals are highly conclusive seeing the uniformity of thepopulation. They compose long format, highly analytic, unpartisan reviews which canbe perceived as inauthentic due to the formality of the text and lack of personal opinions.With these traits, professional online reviews are subjected to the risk of alienating theiraudience, thus losing their influence over the potential adopters. The amateurs were not as uniform as the professionals. However, there are cleartendencies of shorter formats, personal experience-based writing which comes off as moreauthentic compared to the professionals. Within the population of amateurs, one canclearly distinguish that satisfied amateur reviewers’ write shorter reviews but morefrequently, compared to dissatisfied amateur reviewers who write longer format, but notas frequently. Due to the clear and statistically supported differences between the two populations, theyare easily distinguishable from each other. This also shows in their motives to post onlinereviews. Where professionals are financially incentivised, amateurs find their motivationin intrinsic motivators such as altruistic, egotistic, and other self-fulfilling motivators. These distinct differences enable marketers to allocate their efforts towards eitherprofessionals or amateur reviewers in order to achieve the desired market effect. To reacha customer on an emotional level, they should promote amateur reviews. But in order todisplay unadulterated facts and figures, they should promote professional reviews.