Moment Marketing Opportunity: The Link between Online Sentiment and Macroeconomic Conditions

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between moments, in the form of past macroeconomic shocks, and users' propensity to post positive or negative content on the internet about commonly purchased products. Our research uses propriety data from Nielson BuzzMetrics, which contains daily measures of online sentiment for carbonated soft drink brands across multiple online social media channels, such as the number of positive, neutral, and negative online posts on any given day. A vector autoregression model then is used to study the impact that past economic indicators have on the current valence of online sentiment. The findings provide us evidence that the proportion of negative posts increases when the economy indicators are low. In particular, the link between economic conditions and online sentiment is most pronounced and robust for Coke Diet, which suggests that digital marketing managers for this product pay particular attention to the economy when timing the promotion of their online engagement. Marketing managers can then avoid social media promotion of Coke Diet on days immediately following bad economic news, as online sentiment towards this product may be especially vitriol on those days.