Predicting consumer personality traits in the sharing economy: The case of Airbnb
Abstract
For today’s human-centred engagement models and disruptive innovations, personalisation is paramount. In this regard, the use of Big Data analytics to leverage unstructured and user-generated content and create psychographic or psychologically-personalised marketing could well be a game-changer. This article describes a method to identify the ‘Big Five personalities’ of Airbnb guests through the linguistic analysis of their reviews. The study, conducted with IBM Watson Personality Insights AI, obtained these psychometric insights from a sample of 512 guests who had written at least 1,500 words’ worth of reviews. The statistically significant results indicate that Airbnb guests score high in altruism, cooperation, sympathy, trust, cautiousness, dutifulness, activity-level, extraversion, artistic interests, intellect, liberalism and openness. Concurrent with this, they score low in excitement-seeking, gregariousness, anger and self-consciousness.
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Author's Biography
Murat Acar has a PhD degree in Management from Bogazici University, and is a Manager of Consulting Services at Wipro, a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. He has a background in software engineering and a decade of experience in the field of technology and management consulting; he has also lectured on the subject of Big Data and analytics at Bahcesehir University, Turkey. His research interests include data-driven marketing, hyper-personalisation, the sharing economy, service research and systematic literature reviews.
Aysegul Toker is Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Bogazici University, where she is also Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Management. Her research interests include technology and technology adoption both by consumers and organisations, digital marketing, social networks and media, customer relationship management, e-services and mobile applications. Her research into the areas of digital customer engagement, social media, location-based marketing, online communities, mobile marketing, customer relationship management and e-commerce has appeared in various publications. She is also a co-author of ‘Mobile Marketing: Fundamentals and Strategy’ (McGraw Hill, 2011).
Citation
Acar, Murat and Toker, Aysegul (2019, May 9). Predicting consumer personality traits in the sharing economy: The case of Airbnb. In the Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 5, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.69554/DDOF1518.
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