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

Shuyang Li; Yichuan Wang; Raffaele Filieri; Yuzhen Zhu

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2021.104485

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

Tour Manag. 2022 Jun:90:104485. doi: 10.1016/j.tourman.2021.104485. Epub 2021 Dec 31.

Authors

Shuyang Li¹, Yichuan Wang¹, Raffaele Filieri², Yuzhen Zhu³

Affiliations

¹ Sheffield University Management School, The University of Sheffield, Conduit Road, Sheffield, S10 1FL, UK.
² Audencia Business School Marketing Department 8 Route de La Jonelière, 44312, Nantes, France.
³ Information School, the University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello, Sheffield City Centre, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Consumer emotion; Content analysis; Coronavirus (COVID-19); Crisis response; Signalling theory; Social media analytics; Tourism crisis communication; fsQCA.