Corporate COVID-19 Safety Response, Twitter Sentiment Exposure Influence on Customer-Based Brand Equity, Consumer Attitudes, and Intentions: An Experimental Approach
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Date
2021-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Qualitative insights drawn from Twitter discourse about or directed to United Airlines and Costco Wholesale pertaining to their coronavirus-related responses, procedures, or operations are used to develop materials and questions used in an experiment. In the experiment reported in this paper, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communication published by users on Twitter is shown to influence participants' attitudes toward the companies. The authors were interested if a significant difference would be observed in variables measured before and after exposure to Twitter discourse. Measures included brand awareness, brand associations, brand image, brand attitude, perceived quality, trust, loyalty, purchase intention, and customer-based brand equity. Twitter discourse was presented to participants in blocks of material, in random order and counterbalanced, containing either favorable or unfavorable sentiment about the companies. To assess changes in attitude, a measure of brand attitude followed each block of material. Data related to information about participants such as personal Twitter usage, perceived information characteristics of Twitter messages (related to quantity, reliability, quality, and persuasiveness), attitudes about COVID-19 precautionary measures and associated comfort, and perception of greed and blame attribution related to companies of concern was also collected.
Statistical analyses of responses by 305 undergraduate students indicated that eWOM significantly affected attitudes about the organizations. These attitudes were positive for Costco, and negative and of greater magnitude for United Airlines. We also find that comfort in public settings given others wearing mask was our most significant predictor for degree of change in post- and pre-measure scores. Furthermore, we found that the more loyal consumers were before exposure to the messages, the less the Twitter exposure swayed different aspects of their attitudes about the companies. Conclusions from this study have potential significant implications as no research encountered to date shares a similar objective of analyzing changes in consumer sentiment given exposure to eWOM on Twitter using a before and after research design, while also focusing on company actions in the context of a global pandemic.
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Keywords
Twitter, Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM), Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19), Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE), Corporate Consumer Backlash Boycott