ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a deductive and quantitative example of the use of social media data and analysis for adding consumer insight to a particular business operation, retail banking loan operations. It begins with a description of the relevance of a qualitative social media research approach to the banking sector. We review the ways netnography has already been used to study the sector’s customers, and then describe an application using the Spanish retail banking market context. Our use of netnography involves using social media data to identify similarities in consumer narratives about Spanish banks’ most common lending operations: mortgage loans. We quantitatively analyze and visually model the data to try to discern deeper meanings from the social media conversations that are relevant to our research purpose. Finally, the chapter highlights netnography’s potential future importance in the study of other financial and banking sector customers.
