An emoji-based metric for monitoring consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media
Marketing Intelligence & Planning
ISSN: 0263-4503
Article publication date: 15 March 2019
Issue publication date: 19 March 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce and test a new emoji-based metric that could be used to monitor consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media.
Design/methodology/approach
To test this new metric, 720 consumer tweets were retrieved from official Twitter accounts of 18 leading global brands representing 6 product categories/markets. In order to check its validity, the emoji-based metric was correlated with two measures: the percentage of positive emojis from Brandwatch’s (2018) Emoji Report and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for 2017.
Findings
The findings of this paper indicate that consumers tend to use more (vs less) positive emojis when expressing their feelings toward Coca-Cola (vs Taco Bell). They also show that the new metric is highly and positively associated with the ACSI, hence supporting its validity.
Research limitations/implications
The new metric is only applicable to brands that have a social media presence.
Practical implications
The proposed metric is easy to implement and interpret by almost every researcher and manager.
Originality/value
While all extant brand sentiment analyses focus on analyzing the words in brand-related user-generated content, this paper considers an alternative source of information about emotions, that is, emojis. Beyond being valid, the proposed emoji-based metric is unique, easy to implement and interpret, and generalizable.
Keywords
Citation
Moussa, S. (2019), "An emoji-based metric for monitoring consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 211-225. https://doi.org/10.1108/MIP-07-2018-0257
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited