Prompted vs. Organic Customer Insight: Comparing the Value of Focus Groups and Online Reviews in Product and Service Innovation

The rapid proliferation and widespread accessibility of electronic word of mouth (eWoM) have sparked a wave of interest in leveraging these sources to guide product and service innovations. While breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) are rapidly accelerating, it is important to understand how these data sources themselves differ from more traditional options such as surveys, interviews and focus groups. This paper compares focus groups and online reviews to identify their differences and to highlight how both can complement each other. The study explores both data sources using a thematic analysis and zero-shot text classification, respectively. Results show that prompted (i.e. focus groups) and organic sources (i.e. online reviews) can yield different insights in terms of coverage, granularity, timespan and so forth. Neither one nor the other emerges as a superior data source in this study, as they appear complementary. As online reviews are often written after a delightful or unpleasant experience, their detailed and timely insights may position them as a viable choice for incremental innovation. While focus groups may be the ideal environment for participants to imagine and explore radical innovations, many of the recommendations, as well as concerns, were at least implied in a handful of online reviews. Considering the abundance of online reviews and advances in NLP, even a negligible share may be sufficient to derive insights for radical innovation.