The emotion bias of health product consumers in the context of COVID-19

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 28;17(11):e0278219. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278219. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 has led to an increase in negative emotions and health awareness among consumers. This paper discusses the emotion bias of Chinese consumers during the three periods: the pre-COVID-19 period, the COVID-19 lockdown period, and the COVID-19 normalization period. This study takes health products as the research object and crawls relevant reviews on the JD platform to classify products. The data were classified into emotion, the intensity of emotion was calculated, and the logistic regression model and variance analysis were used to analyze the difference in emotion expression. The study reveals that consumers are willing to express fear and sadness during the COVID-19 lockdown era and are willing to express like emotions before the pandemic compared to the three periods. There are also differences in the emotional intensity of different product reviews. The intensity of emotional expression is more vigorous for consumers who purchase nutritional products, while for those who purchase healthcare equipment, the intensity of emotional expression is lower. This study offers the emotion bias of consumers in response to COVID-19 to provide a theoretical basis and reference solution for implementing marketing strategies for health product companies.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Bias
  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • Communicable Disease Control
  • Emotions
  • Humans
  • Publications

Grants and funding

This research was financially supported by Soft Science Project of Shanghai Science and Technology Committee (22692104700); and Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of China(17BGL159). The funder had a role in Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision, Project Administration, Funding Acquisition.