Yana Asenova "Exploring the Impact of Social Media Content on Business Ratings"

This early-stage research project examines how various forms of digital content influence customer evaluations in the restaurant industry. Specifically, it investigates the interplay between user-generated content (UGC), firm-generated content (FGC), and online review discourse in impacting business ratings.

Drawing on a multimodal dataset comprising owned media (official firm Instagram content), earned media (user-generated content and firm mentions on Instagram), and review discourse (Google reviews), this study aims to understand how content characteristics and cross-platform discourse affect consumer perception and evaluation of restaurants.

The current focus is on refining the conceptual model, sharpening construct definitions, and developing a measurement strategy suited to unstructured, multimodal data. Key challenges include extracting and comparing meaning across textual and visual formats, using natural language processing and computer vision techniques. The seminar will provide an opportunity to engage in a discussion about both the theoretical framing and methodological design of this ongoing project.

Yana Asenova began her PhD at Kühne Logistics University in February 2023 under the supervision of Prof. Jan Becker and Prof. Christian Barrot. Her research in Marketing centers on customer engagement with experience goods, with a particular focus on using secondary data to model its impact on business outcomes.