Perceived Vs Recorded Quality of Tissue Paper : A Thematic Analysis of Online Customer Reviews

At the moment, the largest amount of tissue paper products are consumed in East Asia (which includes China and Japan), Europe and North America, and between 2010 and 2023, consumption of tissue paper products is expected to grow by 3% with the largest growth rate in China. Meanwhile, toilet paper, kitchen towels and facial tissues, combined make up 85.2% of all tissue paper products consumed in 2018. While different factors can be named as responsible for this growth in consumption, it is quite difficult to isolate the product-related factors that contribute to the growth of consumption of tissue paper in different countries due to the fact that tissue products have limited uniform specifications between different suppliers. This means, tissue suppliers and tissue machine manufacturers, like Valmet, are left with the challenge of understanding customers’ motivations behind demand of different tissue paper products. This is the motivation behind this study, which is to investigate what qualities of toilet paper, facial tissues and kitchen towels, are customers in the US, China and Japan satisfied or dissatisfied with. This is compared with measurements of the qualities of these products, like softness, strength, thickness, to determine the ranges of values of the products’ qualities that customers are satisfied with. Online reviews of 34 different brands of tissue paper products are collected ethically from online retailer websites (Amazon US, Amazon Japan, Walmart, JD.com), and analysed using the thematic analysis methodology to identify the list of qualities of tissue products that customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with. Then, the Pareto rule was used to identify the top 20% most important qualities to customers. These 34 brands were also purchased from these online retailers and their different qualities were measured. The results and conclusion from the study revealed different insights, among which is that softness is a must-be quality for toilet papers in all countries studied, while water absorption is a must-be quality for kitchen towels. The study also revealed ranges of the numerical values of these qualities that are acceptable to end consumers. Valmet intends to use the conclusions from the study in engagements with tissue paper suppliers in the three countries regarding product strategies and choice of technology.