Charles C. Willow, Ph.D., P.E., associate professor in the department of Management and Leadership in the Leon Hess Business School, recently published “Business Data Analytics Applications to Online Product Reviews and Nationalism” in the “International Journal of Data Analytics (IJDA),” July-December, 2021 edition.
Willow’s article investigates the effect of online reviews for two of the most commonly purchased products across the globe that are available with minimal cultural and access barriers: automobiles and cell phones. To conduct his study, Willow used real-time purchase data traffic, which was cleansed and normalized in order to perform a series of data analytics.
Amidst the economic era in which practically clear borderlines do not exist, Willow argues, global online consumers may still adhere to the importance of country of origin for the products and/or services they select, notwithstanding the opinions, evaluation, and assessments that are available from online reviews generated by other global consumers.
Willow determined that consumers generally adhere to nationalism to complete their purchases of automobiles (e.g. American are likely to purchase Ford over Toyota or Volkswagen, irrespective of the product’s positive/negative reviews). On the other hand, cell phone purchases did not follow the same pattern.
“Data analytics is a relatively new discipline that is adopted and practiced widely across the gamut of academe,” Willow said. “Contrary to common misbelief, it is not a pure quantitative study. Instead, the real-time digital data exchanged across the globe (i.e. big data) is the foundation for it,” he explains, noting that it requires a subtle blend of digital technology and analytical knowledge and expertise.
Willow also says that leading for-profit organizations such as Amazon, Weather.com (IBM), and Morgan Stanley have rapidly replaced their use of traditional/mathematical forecasting models with real-time data analytics.
The IJDA publishes and disseminates knowledge in the areas of data analytics, advances the frontier of data analytics to the applications in diverse fields, and provides a forum for practitioners and researchers in academic, business, and governmental organizations to exchange and share research ideas and innovative methodologies. The journal brings together academic researchers and industry practitioners to exchange ideas, discusses new skills and algorithms, and promotes multidisciplinary collaborations in different fields.
A preview of Willow’s article in the journal is available online.