Review lifecycle analytics and importance–obsolescence analysis: A data-driven design approach to product circularity

Designing products and components with long-term appeal that cater to both early adopters in the new product market and late adopters in the second-hand or remanufacturing markets is essential for extending product longevity and advancing a circular economy through reuse and remanufacturing. Achieving such a circularity-focused design necessitates an understanding of the shifts in customer preferences across different adopter groups, a gap insufficiently addressed in the existing literature. This study seeks to bridge this gap by introducing novel design frameworks called review lifecycle analytics (RLA) and importance-obsolescence analysis (IOA). This systematic review analytics framework reveals dynamic changes in customer preferences over the product adoption lifecycle, enabling design strategies to support product circularity. The RLA-IOA framework analyzes temporal changes in review content through attribute-level sentiment analysis, identifying shifts in the importance and performance of individual attributes between early and late adopters. By generalizing the findings across multiple products, the framework derives the patterns of importance change and obsolescence speed for each attribute, providing valuable design insights for enhancing product longevity through reuse and remanufacturing. As a novel data-driven approach, the RLA-IOA establishes a link between review analytics and sustainable design for circularity. To demonstrate its application and value, this study conducted a case analysis using 63,391 online customer reviews of 12 smartphone models from two brands.