Consumer communications and current events: a cross-cultural study of the change in consumer response to company social media posts due to the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of consumers in virtually every nation. Based upon the theory of psychological reactance and psychoevolutionary theory of emotion, we hypothesize how such lifestyle changes affect consumers perceiving and responding to companies' communications messages. The theories also suggest that consumers in different cultures may respond to COVID-19 differently. To test our hypotheses, we implemented a Python scraper to collect companies’ Instagram posts pre- and during the COVID-19 lockdown. A machine learning algorithm was applied on the collected post photos to automatically identify certain photo characteristics, such as indoor versus outdoor, and with a single person versus many people; a text mining and sentiment analysis was implemented on the collected post captions to identify the salient emotion each caption exhibited, such as joy and anticipation. After that, we conducted a regression discontinuity analysis of photo characteristics or caption emotion on number of likes or comments to identify consumers’ response change due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The estimation results supported our hypotheses and suggested tactics that could improve consumer communications effectiveness in this changed time. Viewing COVID-19 as an example of a current event in the ever-changing world, this paper suggests that such events could impact consumer response and behavior, and that companies’ marketing and advertising strategies should be responsive to such events. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41270-021-00138-3.