Assessing Twitter data from last year’s rollout and recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which was plagued by explosions, Chicago Booth’s Pradeep K. Chintagunta finds that while the phone itself took a beating in terms of sentiment, the main Samsung brand was not too badly affected.
Separated into tallies of positive, negative, and neutral tweets, the data provide a timeline of public sentiment. For simplicity’s sake, we intentionally leave out the percentages of neutral tweets. Though the Samsung chart may appear mundane, since it shows little fluctuation through the time period, the juxtaposition proved intriguing from a brand-management perspective.
In the details: The data offer the opportunity to create a chart using a reverse scale. While the bars representing positive sentiment stretch upward, the ones representing negative sentiment go downward. Typically, charts with bars going downward indicate actual negative numbers, but in this case, the intention is to visually show the balance of the two data sets using the same 0 percent baseline.