Social Media Analysis of Perceived Product Obsolescence

Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are among the main goals for companies. In this context, the moment of and reason for obsolescence of a product is of particular importance for the customer satisfaction and repurchase decision. The reasons for obsolescence are manifold and usually unknown to the producing company. Besides product failures, a decrease in modern design, changing customer needs or new technologies available can cause obsolescence. This paper presents a study for investigating obsolescence from a customer perspective. To this end, social media reviews from Amazon have been extracted and analyzed in order to reveal the reasons of obsolescence with respect to product category.