Together with colleagues Anatoli Colicev (Bocconi University, Italy) and Koen Pauwels (Northeastern University, Boston), Raoul Kübler won the Marketing Science Institute’s prestigious Top Download Award. Their paper „Social Media’s Impact on Consumer Mindset: When to Use Which Sentiment Extraction Tool?“ was the most downloaded MSI report paper in 2018. The paper combines millions of user comments from 48 different Facebook brand pages with daily YouGov brand metrics to investigate which types of sentiment analysis tools works best to predict traditional mind set metrics along a consumer’s decision funnel with the help of user generated content. “Apparently managers as well as academics discover more and more the potential of social media based user comments when it comes to measure consumer attitudes,” explains Raoul Kübler.

In the paper the international team contrasts different state of the art tools to measure text-based sentiment such as machine learning based bottom up approaches (i.e. support vector machines) and dictionary based top down approaches (i.e. Linguistic Inquiry Word Count) and compares them with traditional volume metrics such as the amount of likes, comments and shares. The study identifies multiple contingency factors that determine in which industries and in case of which mindset metrics the different tools predict best.

“Right now many studies as well as marketing applications only rely on simple tools. The most obvious tools however do not need to be the best option. We show that only by using the most appropriate sentiment extraction tool for an industry and specific mindset metric, managers can fully leverage the power of user generated content,” closes Professor Kübler.

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The awarded study can be found here.

A short list with the previous award winners can be found here.