Language as a tool for understanding consumer attitudes and improving the social impact of sustainable products

In this interdisciplinary project in linguistics, text mining and management at Lund University, we explore linguistic (lexical semantic) information that provides insights about consumer attitudes towards sustainable food products and toiletries. More specifically, our aim is to determine what criteria people, representing different sociodemographic groups in terms of gender, age, educational background, professional activity and nationality, make use of when they assess and select these products. A corpus of texts extracted from two different sources (social media texts and questionnaires) is compiled, and sociodemographic information about the authors is attributed to the collected texts. The annotated data are analyzed from the point of view of consumer satisfaction in terms of their different social profiles, and according to the way they position themselves towards sustainable consumption. The linguistic clues (e.g., lexical-semantic patterns), as well as the quantitative information (e.g., satisfaction score), are further elaborated, and important insights about the reviewed products and their social impact are derived.