The internet is filled with information on every topic imaginable. It is an outlet for people to express their ideas, emotions and opinions about every topic. The last decade, researchers have been using this pool of data for a variety of research purposes by means of a methodology called netnography.
Briefly, it can be describe that netnography is the combination of ‘internet’ and ‘ethnography’. Netnography is an ethnographic implementation in a computer-based environment, and is called digital or virtual ethnography. In line with qualitative research, netnography is essential to provide an opportunity to comprehend and to form an opinion about the relations between virtual environments and the symbolic meanings of consumers’ needs, demands and choices . Ethnography is an anthropological method which has become popular in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, consumer analysis and social sciences . Traditionally, normative and qualitative approaches are developed by adopting qualitative and ethnographic methods which enlighten postmodern methods and are used in order to comprehend consumer experiences. These methods have started to be used in the online environment . Robert Kozinets, a pioneer of netnography, first defined and used it in 1997. He defined netnography as “a written account of online cyberculture, informed by the methods of cultural anthropology” . Netnography, or online ethnography, involves a researcher joining, recording, analyzing and interpreting the content of an online e-tribe or social media site. Thus, netnography, like ethnography is about a researcher observing and recording, for an extended period of time, the acts and discussions of a target population.
Netnography is unsolicited, realistic and unobtrusive; it is less time consuming and expensive than ethnography . It allows the researcher to gain deeper insights into consumers’ opinions, motives, worries and concerns in an inconspicuous manner [55]. Observing the behavior of individuals online rather than face-to-face eliminates the human aspect of the observation. All of the data collected from an online forum is usually in a textual format, and, therefore, cannot include data that could be relevant to an ethnographer, such as body language, eye contact, tone of voice, posture, general mood and movements. However, it does follow the same epistemology as ethnography in that results are not generalized to broader contexts but simply represent a particular observation of a lived experience which can inform decisions or future research.