Analysis of perceptual maps of airline passenger transportation services in Turkey on Twitter in relationship with positioning concept

Nowadays, competition is so important that businesses are trying to have an important position in the minds of customers in terms of brand or product or service by creating value. Positioning, one of the marketing applications, is aimed at determining how brands, products and services are positioned in competition with competitors, as well as consumers' perceptions. Therefore, any information that can be obtained from customers for product or brand positioning studies has great importance to create perception maps that express the brand's perception in the consumer's mind. On the other hand, internet and social media, which emerged with the development of technology, have become important platforms that businesses use frequently to obtain information from customers. The evaluation of information obtained from social media, especially in positioning studies, provides great benefit to businesses on time and cost. In this study, messages that are sent on Twitter which is one of the social media platform between June 1 to September 1, 2017 for airlines operating in airline market of Turkey, are used. Based on these messages, perception maps were created within the scope of brand and service dimensions. In the first step of the research; automated text classification techniques for sentiment analysis and service dimensions implemented and messages tagged to airline companies have been automatically classified using various machine learning algorithms. In the second stage of the study; perceptions for each brand and service dimension were uncovered and analyzed by Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) Analysis in SPSS program and perceptual maps of various periods were obtained.