Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
9-2016
Abstract
In September 2015 the Environmental Protection Agency found that many Volkswagen cars sold in the United States were equipped with software that could falsely improve the performance of diesel engines on emissions tests. This cheating was subsequently acknowledged by the car maker.Among the many issues at stake for the company was one of public perception. Anecdotal evidence at the time of the incident suggested irreparable harm to the Volkswagen brand. So could Volkswagen recover in the short term in this regard? And, the broader question, how can you measure brand perception in times of scandal, particularly in an era where social media can cause negative news to proliferate and reverberate over time?In the absence of direct empirical evidence, we wanted to find a way to tackle this important issue. We began our research with some key questions: How does social media sentiment change as a consequence of a public relations crisis? How does the public react to recovery efforts initiated by the company? How do topics of conversation shift as a consequence of a brand scandal and subsequent recovery efforts?
Keywords
Twitter, crisis, Volkswagen, emissions test, cheating
Discipline
Business and Corporate Communications | Marketing | Social Media
Research Areas
Marketing
Publication
Harvard Business Review
ISSN
0017-8012
Publisher
Harvard Business Review
Citation
SWAMINATHAN, Vanitha and MAH, Suyun.
What 100,000 tweets about the Volkswagen scandal tell us about angry customers. (2016). Harvard Business Review.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6892
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
External URL
https://hbr.org/2016/09/what-100000-tweets-about-the-volkswagen-scandal-tell-us-about-angry-customers
Additional URL
https://hbr.org/2016/09/what-100000-tweets-about-the-volkswagen-scandal-tell-us-about-angry-customers