Conflict delistings and their impact on the sentiment of consumers' Twitter posts An empirical analysis of consumers' Tweets' sentiment scores

Abstract

As conflict delistings have a major impact on the financial performance of the involved brands and social media is getting increasingly important in business and consumers' daily life, research is conducted to improve the academic knowledge of how delistings impact the social media sentiment of consumers' posts. The study at hand investigated the direct effect of conflict delistings on the sentiment of consumers' Tweets addressed to the involved brands. Furthermore, the present study analyses how product involvement moderates the direct effect of those delistings. In doing so, the sentiment of Tweets, which were related to the brands of the investigated delisting cases, have been analyzed. Those Tweets were classified by the sentiment analysis tool of MonkeyLearn as negative, neutral, or positive. In order to compare the mean sentiment of the four delisting cases, three time spans, and two brands per case, 28 independent t-tests were conducted. Surprisingly, the results show no statistically significant direct effect of conflict delisting on the analyzed Tweets' sentiment. However, the results propose a significant long-term moderating effect of product involvement, as high product involvement cases are more influenced by the conflict delistings. Those results are improving the academic knowledge on conflict delistings, as they are somewhat contradictory to the proposed significant impact of conflict delistings on the social media sentiment of consumers. Therefore, those findings create an academic debate and suggestion for further research. Especially, the finding of a long-term significant moderating effect of product involvement is highly relevant for brand managers as it provides knowledge into how delisting conflict could be dealt with.