Getting to know consumer habits and understanding customer motivations is a good way to increase sales and grow your business. These goals can be achieved by analyzing emotions in the publications of Internet users, especially those related to your own brand. In this article we talk about the study of emotions in marketing and their impact on consumer behavior.
Emotions in marketing – are they worth exploring?
Emotions are responsible for certain body reactions and influence a person’s behavior. When analyzing emotions online, we use Robert Plutchik’s model, which distinguishes 8 basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, trust, surprise and anticipation. In expression, anger can lead to confrontation or aggression, joy enhances creativity and decision-making.
Sadness speaks of lack and manifests withdrawal, disgust rejects and stimulates flight, and fear also causes the urge to flee or attack. Trust speaks of closeness and relationship quality, surprise is an inducer of other emotions and feelings, and anticipation stimulates the body, preparing it for an upcoming event.
Since emotions are responsible for instinctive reactions, knowing their intensity can help predict consumer behaviour, improve customer service or monitor the brand image more effectively online. Knowing what evokes positive associations in customers, one can shape advertising, marketing and PR policy. Emotions are useful in creating characteristics of customers (persona) or for storytelling.
Researching customer emotions – advantages
Examining emotions in your own customers gives your company insight into consumer behavior. It will be useful e.g. when validating the effects of an advertising or communication campaign or in Content Marketing. It will help in creating tailored messages and more precise targeting of groups, more effective collection of leads, implementation of display campaigns, etc.
By examining the emotions of the recipients, the company may monitor its image and react in advance to the symptoms of crisis.
Emotion analysis versus sentiment analysis – the differences
The two terms are not used interchangeably; this is a mistake. Emotion analysis is the study of basic emotions – the unconscious, instinctual reactions of the brain and body to external or internal stimuli (e.g., thoughts, memories) and their effect on a person’s behavior. Meanwhile, sentiment analysis refers to reactions that are thought out and controlled by the subject: after becoming aware of the action of an emotion, he or she makes a decision that results in a mental attitude – sentiment.
Its study gives a result in the form of positive and negative sentiment, but we get an overall negative result without indicating the specific emotion and the behavior following it. With emotion analysis, we get the percentage score of each of the 8 emotions in the utterance, plus the sentiment analysis and the emotional arousal index.
They can check their own and their competitors’ emotionally charged phrases to determine how customers feel about their products or services, compare them with those of their competitors, and then make changes – to their offerings, their communication, or just their image.
Negative emotions: what can trigger them in marketing?
Negative emotions are conventionally called emotions whose perception is perceived as unpleasant. This perception gives the whole group of emotions a pejorative name, but the emotions themselves are warning signals of danger and are therefore not negative. In marketing or advertising emotions with such overtones may appear as a result of specific actions of brands or companies. What causes negative reactions of consumers?
For example, the use of the message, which strikes at the key values of the recipients of communication, breaks stereotypes, refers to unpopular views. Such slip-ups are the domain of multinationals that cannot predict the effects of actions in culturally distinct societies and do not take into account the mood of the target group. Another example is misalignment of the message with the requirements of the target group: it indicates misunderstanding of the group’s needs and will cause its frustration, which will translate into poor sales results and unfavorable comments on the Internet – and thus a scratch on the company/brand image.
Actions that cause negative emotions can also include overly intrusive PR and advertising, provocative actions (e.g. viral marketing), reprehensible practices towards employees, destruction of the environment, laboratory testing on animals, etc.
Negative customer emotions and their consequences
Customers most often talk about negative emotions through the company’s communication channels – social media, portals, e-mail. They comment under posts or create them themselves, review products and services, write opinions on forums, under articles, etc.
If the company’s message evokes negative emotions in them and these persist, their consequences will include negative WOMM (spreading unfavourable comments and opinions), brand switching (moving to the competition), brand detachment (severing relations with the brand), filing complaints, and even consumer boycotts, organizing protests or taking legal action.
How should a company respond to the negative emotions of its customers?
Negative emotions in your customers cannot be avoided, but you can minimize their effects. That’s why you should choose the analysis of emotions contained in the content. In social listening it will give you an up-to-date insight into the moods of your customers, in brand monitoring – the perception of the brand, it will also help to predict the behavior of consumers. And what to do when the symptoms of crisis appear? First of all, do not ignore them.
Negative moods will not subside on their own. Then accept the criticism and analyze the customer’s point of view – it is possible that the company’s policy was based on wrong assumptions. Finally – take concrete corrective actions, e.g. dialogue with the client, validation of communication or marketing activities, or improvement of the controversial service or product.
Interpretation of results:
The customer felt strongly surprised (62%) by the controversial statement of the maintenance department. She is angry about this (52%), but also feels anger about the careless finish of the apartment she bought.
The high level of surprise also relates to the individual faults that the customer mentions in her comment: the wrong way to suspend the ceiling, the faulty damp insulation around the chimney, the unprotected attic, the lack of a well-functioning but legally executed ventilation of the room with the fireplace or stove, the deficiencies in the electrical system and their repair that does not comply with building regulations, and finally the excessively high prices of additional services.
This state of affairs makes the customer feel sad (48%) and at the same time disgusted (loathing – 40%). The commentator does not know what else will happen to her in connection with the purchase (expectation – 35%), is afraid that things will not turn out well (fear – 36%), but still has hope for a positive outcome (expectation – 35%, trust – 21%). Finally, there is the indicator of joy (22%).
In the present case, it refers to ironic comments towards the developer, who is satisfied with his actions. We also have results for sentiment and emotional agitation – positive – 21%, negative – 45%, emotional agitation – 67%. This last element indicates that the commenter is highly agitated and inclined to take action.
What actions from such a client should be expected? Her emotional state, accompanying negative sentiment, and high arousal rate will likely push the commenter to post negative comments (negative WOMM) on forums, social media, and anywhere else she sees requests for feedback about this particular developer. In all likelihood, she will advertise any faults that arise with the developer, and possibly – pursue legal action.
Author: Igor Starczak. The publication also appeared in the quarterly “Developer & Marketing” (No. 3 / 2021).
This is undoubtedly one of the most commented political topics of recent weeks. Lex TVN. What it is. It’s a parliamentary draft of amendments to the media law, the proceedings of which coincided with the expiration of the license to broadcast the TVN24 television station. Is the topic heating up citizens online? If so, how much?
Lex TVN. What is it about and how do Internet users react?
The TVN24 station, according to the new law, may not get its 10-year broadcasting license renewed,
The topic has been one of the most popular in recent weeks and has been strongly agitating Internet users,
Emotions are rising as soon as one remembers that the whole issue is being watched personally by US President Joe Biden.The topic of the concession to the TVN24 station stirs emotions, as evidenced by the high emotion arousal of Internet users. We examined the discussion of the so-called Lex TVN across the web (not only social media, but also comments under editorials and on forums and blogs and elsewhere). This is a total of almost 180,000 opinions of Internet users. The chart below illustrates the number of statements on the subject online and the average daily intensity of emotional arousal. The values of this indicator for the entire analyzed period, i.e. from July 8 to August 2 this year, were higher than 50%.
The topic of the TVN24 station’s concession stirs emotions, as evidenced by the high emotional arousal of Internet users. We examined the discussion of the so-called Lex TVN across the web (not only social media, but also comments under editorials and on forums and blogs and elsewhere). This is a total of almost 180,000 opinions of Internet users. The chart below illustrates the number of statements on the subject online and the average daily intensity of emotional arousal.
Contexts of negative discussion on Lex TVN
As is standard with the topic of media repolonization, the key contexts for negative discussion are: free media, freedom of speech, independent media. A lot of discussion was devoted to foreign capital in the media (here, too, the context is about private business, the civilized world, the owner of TVN). However, the citizen’s right to access the media and to reliable information was pointed out. As standard, criticism went in the direction of the ruling party, the public media were slashed (context: propaganda tube, brainwashing, dark people). Also standard in this type of discussion is extensive reference to other current policy issues. This is another typical clash of tribes in the digital world.
In terms of discussion venues, we recorded the most anger on news portals, i.e. in conversations among Internet users under editorials (level of almost 40%). The most joy, on the other hand, appeared on Facebook. There, many posts and content were published under which people cheered the opposition in taking action to defend their favorite TV station.
In general, however, the dominance of negative emotion is noticeable in all media, although the level of emotion saturation = 50% was not exceeded in any of the sources.
Conclusions
In 2020. Poland has dropped as many as 11 positions on the list of the strongest national brands (Soft Power Index). It seems that Lex TVN is another unnecessary and potentially dangerous image crisis for the country. Such events have a direct impact not only on polarizing citizens and fueling further conflicts. They cause more tangible losses – declines in the rankings of the strongest brands-countries (e.g., Country Index, in which Poland fell 11 notches to position 55 in 2020). The situation around Lex TVN – even if it’s just a holiday substitute topic – could scare off potential investors and damage our foreign policy.
From the point of view of surveys of conversations among Internet users, this is another topic in a whole sea of political topics to stir up the electorate online. It can also be a completely surrogate issue, thrown in by politicians for the vacation season to stoke extreme emotion. There is also no denying that the topic has somewhat run out of steam in recent days.
The defense, according to the opposition, of the so-called “free media” does not break through as strongly in the online world. The issue can also be considered on another level. The ruling party has a plan to win the next election. It can do this with TVN24 (it has succeeded many times), but it may not succeed in the absence of Internet control. Perhaps the next installment of the battle for control in the media will be in this space. The station, which is the subject of Lex TVN, will become a forbidden fruit once the new law is passed. This means that its popularity – contrary to the assumptions of the new law – is likely to soar.
Introduction: Vaccinations are referred to as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. However, their effectiveness is also constantly denied by certain groups in society. This results in an ongoing dispute that has been gradually moving online in the last few years due to the development of technology. Our study aimed to utilize social media to identify and analyze vaccine-deniers’ arguments against child vaccinations.
Method: All public comments posted to a leading Polish vaccination opponents’ Facebook page posted between 01/05/2019 and 31/07/2019 were collected and analyzed quantitatively in terms of their content according to the modified method developed by Kata (Kata, 2010). Sentiment analysis was also performed.
Results: Out of 18,685 comments analyzed, 4,042 contained content covered by the adopted criteria: conspiracy theories (28.2%), misinformation and unreliable premises (19.9%), content related to the safety and effectiveness of vaccinations (14.0%), noncompliance with civil rights (13.2%), own experience (10.9%), morality, religion, and belief (8.5%), and alternative medicine (5.4%). There were also 1,223 pro-vaccine comments, of which 15.2% were offensive, mocking, or non-substantive. Sentiment analysis showed that comments without any arguments as well as those containing statements about alternative medicine or misinformation were more positive and less angry than comments in other topic categories.
Conclusions: The large amount of content in the conspiracy theory and misinformation categories may indicate that authors of such comments may be characterized by a lack of trust in the scientific achievements of medicine. These findings should be adequately addressed in vaccination campaigns.
@article{doi:10.1080/21645515.2020.1850072,
author = {Krzysztof Klimiuk and Agnieszka Czoska and Karolina Biernacka and Łukasz Balwicki},
title = {Vaccine misinformation on social media – topic-based content and sentiment analysis of Polish vaccine-deniers’ comments on Facebook},
journal = {Human Vaccines \& Immunotherapeutics},
volume = {0},
number = {0},
pages = {1-10},
year = {2021},
publisher = {Taylor & Francis},
doi = {10.1080/21645515.2020.1850072},
note ={PMID: 33517844},
The topic of vaccines, and specifically the differences between them, arouses great emotion. Analysis of Google search phrases shows that the public is still looking for information on the differences between preparations of different manufacturers. “Which vaccine to choose?”, “Moderna or Pfizer?” – are just some of them. This time we took to the workshop conversations of Internet users about five preparations. We explored the emotions and sentiment between them to see how they differ.
Pfizer or Moderna, or which vaccine to choose?
The material analyzed by our team represents a total of nearly 190,000 mentions of five vaccine manufacturers between January 1 and May 6, 2021. Content about specific manufacturers was filtered out of discussions about COVID-19 vaccines overall. Using the SentiTool tool, it only took a few minutes to get the full results.
Preparations were most often discussed by Internet users under articles on news sites. The second place in terms of discussion sites was Twitter, followed by Facebook. On news portals, Internet users discussed AstraZeneca most often. This is also where a lot of opinions about the Sputnik-V vaccine from Russia were reported online. On Twitter and Facebook, but also in other places, it was Pfizer. These two vaccines are among the most commented on.
The graph of discussion dynamics (monthly data) shows that the AstraZeneca controversy has had its effect. This vaccine was discussed very intensively – most often in March this year. Johnson&Johnson was the least discussed. It is worth noting that in a significant number of opinions there were more names of preparations.
COVID-19 vaccines – a comparison. Sentiment and emotion
When looking at the differences in sentiment of opinion of a given vaccine versus the others, two extremes are clearly visible. Johnson’s was the most positively commented on during the study period. In contrast, the most negative statements were reported around Sputnik-V. The controversy around vaccine reactions after AstraZeneca’s vaccine ultimately did not impair the online image. More unfavorable content was seen from Pfizer, which may come as a surprise.
DIFFERENCES IN OPINION SENTIMENT BETWEEN VACCINES DURING THE STUDY PERIOD
Differences in the intensity of negative and positive sentiment inopinions on COVID-19 formulations. The graph shows how sentiment differed for each vaccine from the other four
This preparation is one of the most popular among Poles and it is with this preparation that citizens most often want to be vaccinated. This may have been influenced by the co-occurrence of other preparation names together with Pfizer. This is because we are primarily examining the general climate of online discussion around the products of pharmaceutical companies. Thus the graph below shows how opinions on one preparation could have influenced the discussion climate around another preparation on the basis of co-occurrence. Moderna and AstraZeneca co-occurred most frequently with Pfizer.
Co-occurrence analysis of formulations in online reviews
The chart below breaks the positive and negative sentiment into eight base emotions for an even closer look at vaccine opinions. Sputnik-V differed from the other formulations with a high dose of disgust (about 13% more than the others) from internet users, while Pfizer differed with fear and sadness. AstraZeneca reported a slight increase in confidence and expectation. With the same emotions, single-dose Johnson differed from the rest most on the plus side (with strong decreases in negative emotions relative to competitors). As for Moderna, there is little difference from the other four formulations against COVID-19.
The above analysis is illustrative and informative. It does not reflect the full results of the study.
Emotion analysis is the primary (next to sentiment and emotional arousal analysis, of course) function of the science-based Sentimenti tools we have been developing for many years. With the new year our solution has grown in value and can handle perfectly not only Polish but also seventeen other languages. The following study proves that we do it with almost equal efficiency.
Many languages, one tool. Sentimenti already handles 18 languages
In a summary posted on our blog at the beginning of 2021, specifically on January 4, we reported on new challenges. The Sentimenti team has not settled on its laurels and is working hard to develop and improve the tools. The result? We can now analyze large collections of texts in… 18 languages! However, in order to prove (not only to ourselves) that we are doing this effectively, we decided to analyze one solid text translated into many languages, and then check the emotions, sentiment and emotional arousal it contains.
To raise the bar for our tools, we took a rather funny and often sarcasm-laden text. These requirements were met perfectly by the content of Maysoon Zayid’s speech during TEDWomen in December 2013. Zayid is a writer, actress, comedian and co-founder of New York’s Arab-American Comedy Festival. Read/watch the entire piece below, or: HERE.
Thanks to the analysis with Sentimenti tools of the content of the speech in Polish, English, German and Spanish it has been confirmed that the results of the intensity of emotions are very similar. This proves high effectiveness. But that is not all! Our systems perfectly detected sarcasm and irony contained in the speech, which at times was indeed not lacking.
Emotion analysis versus sarcasm, humor, and irony. How effective?
“I have infantile cerebral palsy. I shake all the time.” – informs the recipient Maysoon Zayid at the very beginning of her unusual, comical speech. The content of her speech is not only sarcasm, humor and irony. Above all, the writer does it with great grace. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that her speech is mainly dedicated to the fact that each of us can do anything if we want to.
She herself has walked the red carpet, starred in a movie with Adam Sandler and worked with many other artists. She has also traveled the world, and the number of things she does every day would put many a healthy person to shame.
Returning to the analysis, however, the content study thus confirmed all the theses posed in the introduction. The percentage of positive sentiment, as well as the sum of the percentages of positive versus negative emotions, are higher. The text emotionally aroused mainly with positive emotions. The emotive data (on the scale), in turn, indicated the actual emotions evoked in the viewer.
This happened despite the strongly humorous style of speech throughout the speech. The emotion analysis and its results in the aforementioned languages are very similar to each other. The subtle differences (which we show in the graph below) between them are more due to the varying verbal volume of the same (in semantic terms) sentences. These differences did not exceed the value of 3%.
One content, multiple languages. For what purpose?
Analysis of emotion, sentiment, and emotional arousal in content has wide applications. Studying the same qualitative parameters in content in multiple languages offers even more possibilities. It is not only the analysis of web publications, extensive excerpts from books or magazines or chats with customers. Thanks to multilingual analysis we have an opportunity to get to know the attitude of the Internet towards various issues without language barrier.
The Internet is a huge space where people share opinions about everything. Internet users comment on practically every topic no matter where they are from. Therefore, we cannot remain indifferent to the potential that lies dormant here. Development of tools to analyze new languages is simply a market requirement.
Monitoring the Internet is a necessity and daily work for many companies, and researching emotions, sentiment and excitement on many markets (not only Polish) gives even more information without which it is difficult to do business.
Sentimenti tools have many applications in various fields – from e-commerce to politics, from image crisis research to customer experience. It’s also an excellent, already multilingual, research tool for various types of studies.
Additional perks? Sentimenti’s tools “read” data as if it were being done by the 20,000+ people who participated in Sentimenti’s research and creation. They also do it much faster than a manual survey. Explore our OFFER.
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