Reactionary sentiment - An Uber and Samsung sentiment analysis of situational crisis management

Corporate reputation plays in integral role for businesses when it comes to distinguishing themselves from their competition, as well as the continued value creation for all involved stakeholders. Additionally, corporate reputation is an assessment of how stakeholders perceive a company by means of communication and actions of the firm. There has been extensive amount of research on the effect of a single crisis on corporate reputation, however research conducted on multiple crises and their effects on corporate reputation is scarce. This research aims to fill the gap in literature by employing sentiment analyses to find out how the public perceives a company and how this sentiment is impacted by a corporate crisis. By looking at sentiment levels in tweets from stakeholders of both Uber and Samsung at various points in time, this research employed a quantitative approach in conjunction with several quantitative analyses in order to answer the proposed research question. Uber and Samsung have been chosen for this research due to the fact that both have been facing a multiplicity of large crises during the last several years. The addition that one company has a high corporate reputation and the other one not gives another dimension to this study. Additionally, this research aimed at understanding how a company’s response would influence the sentiment, how public sentiment towards a company would be affected by multiple crises, as well as the importance of corporate reputation on all of this. The findings show that there is a variation in how long it takes for a company to recover from a crisis, as well as that multiple crises of the same company have a detrimental negative effect on positive sentiment, especially for companies in a slow-paced industry. Companies with a high pre-crisis reputation are impacted longer by the repercussions of a crisis, seeing as customers are not used to having to deal with a crisis in the first place. Furthermore, a statement on the situation of the crisis by a company can have a positive effect on the restoration of positive sentiment, however it also has the potential to work against the company.