#Lacoste seems to be worried about the latest developments during the Australian Opens, as they asked their flagship testimonial  #Djokovic to come to the #MFBrands headquarters in Switzerland to discuss what happened in the wake of the #AustralianOpen. 

Looking at how people reacted to the Serbian tennis player's latest incident, Lacoste seems to have good reason to at least be cautious. To gain a better understanding of people's reaction, we extracted more than 400,000 Tweets mentioning the tennis star between November 2021 and mid January 2022. We find Tweets in more than 20 languages discussing the tennis player's behaviour and the incident. Given the high heterogeneity in sentiment classifier accuracy, it is difficult to really compare effects across these different cultural settings and languages. So we decided to focus on a universal type of communication: symbols! Luckily, people tend to more and more rely on Emojis to express themselves, when communicating on social media. We build on this phenomena with our analysis. 

Below you find an animation of the 15 most often used Emojis per day used in Tweets mentioning #Djokovic. It is interesting to see that we are easily able to understand how the conversation switched from tennis 🎾 to vaccination 💉 and to the potential issues when entering Australia 🇦🇺. Striking to also see that people on Twitter discussed this potential issue mid December way before main stream media picked up the topic. 

Looking at people's reactions we can further see that Lacoste is well advised to at least worry, as reactions include angry (😡), mocking (🤡), as well as laughing (😂) and crying (😢 😭) emojis. Still we also see a lot of support in form of hearts ♥️ and other emojis (💪). 

While we look here at the perception of Djokovic, it remains right now still unclear, if the brand will face some spillover. We did not yet see too many Tweets which mention the tennis player directly with Lacoste. Only after Financial Times revealed that Lacoste showed some worries, the Twittersphere starts discussing the topic, underlining again that sometimes brands would be well advised to stay calm and to internally address these issues before feeling the urge to take precautions here. A lot of attention has recently been given by #marketingresearch to this issue. Companies who wonder, what forms a shitstorm and what may stimulate public debate or catch media attention may find the following readings interesting:

Beside finding interesting insights for crisis research, this case also underlines the vast potential of analysing social media data with the help of symbols. While some people mock social media users for going back to ancient Egyptian times, as we use again symbols for communication, we should acknowledge the potential that comes with this global form of communication. Many sentiment measures suffer strong issues, when we try to compare effects across languages and contexts. Emojis may help us to address this problem. We just need to develop a better understanding of how to use them when listening to consumers. A thing we are very passionate about at the Junior Professur of Marketing and Marketing Analytics in at Marketing Center Münster.