Evaluating brand equity in the hospitality industry: Insights from customer journeys and text mining

To achieve effective marketing, continual enhancement of product and service quality is pivotal. Assessing brand equity encompasses diverse methods, including questionnaires and interviews, unearthing invaluable customer insights. The choice of data collection methods, driven by researchers' objectives, may extend beyond direct customer interactions to employ techniques such as text mining, extracting insights from customer posts and reviews. A study at Phuket's Amari Hotel seamlessly integrated customer journey analysis with text mining, yielding a robust hotel equity model. Notably, the findings unveiled the substantial influence of factors like location and community value on hotel equity, often overlooked in previous studies. Remarkably, the hotel accommodation room emerged as the dominant touchpoint (81 %). These insights can fuel the transformation of marketing strategies and brand equity assessment. Moreover, this framework accommodates dynamic customer behavior while delivering cost efficiencies compared to alternative machine learning methods.