Eliciting positive emotion through strategic responses to COVID-19 crisis: Evidence from the tourism sector.

While social media are effective means of communicating with adverse customer emotions during a crisis, it remains unclear how tourism organisations can respond to pandemic crisis on social media to prevent negative aftermaths. Using a set-theoretical approach, we investigate how COVID-19 response strategies and linguistic cues of responses are intertwined to evoke positive emotions among consumers. This study entails a qualitative content analysis of tourism organisations' COVID-19 announcements and a social media analytics approach that captures consumers' emotional reactions to these announcements via their Twitter replies. Our results extend some well-established findings in the tourism crisis literature by suggesting that combining innovative response strategy, argument quality, and assertive language can reinforce positive emotions during the COVID-19 crisis. Taking organisational characteristics into consideration, we suggest that young established hotels utilise innovative response strategies, whereas retrenchment response strategies for all types of restaurants should be avoided during the COVID-19 crisis.

Corporate Responses to the Coronavirus Crisis and their Impact on Electronic-Word-of-Mouth and Trust Recovery: Evidence from Social Media

Abstract This study examines how corporate responses to service failure, caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, influence electronic-word-of-mouth (E-WoM) and trust recovery around lockdown, using multiple data sources. A dataset of 398 valid COVID-19 announcements from 50 UK food retailers posted on the social media platform Twitter, and 21,960 consumer comments associated with these announcements, are analysed using content analysis and social media analytics, respectively. In Study 1, we test the effects of corporate crisis response strategy (defensive vs. offensive) and response framing (emotional vs. rational) on consumer E-WoM (measured as ?consumer sentiment?). The results reveal that using a defensive corporate response strategy with emotionally framed announcements leads to more positive consumer E-WoM. In Study 2, we advance the findings of Study 1 using a vignette-based experimental design to examine how social media announcements made by food retailing brands influence consumers? trust recovery. We find that consumer trust recovers significantly when corporate COVID-19 responses are framed in an emotional manner. By drawing upon signalling theory, this study makes an important contribution to public health crisis communication and service failure literature by demystifying consumers? reactions towards corporate crisis responses amid a pandemic.