Festive or Failure? Differences in Sentiments of Consumer Tweets on Amazon Festive Flash Sale before and after COVID-19

Abstract

Amazon’s Great Indian Sale is an annual mega shopping festival and provides an opportunity for retailers selling on e-commerce platforms to increase their sales, traffic as well as visibility. This study aims to understand consumer behaviour through the analysis of user-generated content (UGC) on social media concerning Amazon’s Great Indian Sale from 2015 to 2020. This time period was especially significant since it allowed for the analysis of differences caused by the pandemic. It was further divided into pre-COVID-19, during  COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 period. The study also aims to establish a causal relationship between the feelings of engagement of the UGC on Twitter, with the strategies of marketing and promotion of the companies. Twitter’s API was used to extract the UGC. A two-step methodology was used to extract meaningful insights. First, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify major topics related to the Flash sales organized during the festive season. Next, Sentiment Analysis was used to classify each tweet into Positive, Negative and Neutral Sentiments in order to understand user opinions and feelings towards the marketing campaign. It was found that both during the COVID period as well as the post COVID period, topics like Deals & Offers and Exclusive Promotions were positively perceived by consumers. Topics like Pre-event Excitement, Diwali Shopping Experience, Customer Support, and Money-saving Opportunities generated positive feelings during the pre-COVID times. During COVID times, positive sentiments were generated by topics like Delivery Workers and Attractive Deals for Gifting. On the other hand, topics like Insults and Noise generated negative sentiments in both the COVID and post COVID periods. The findings of this study are significant not only to improve and devise marketing strategies and social media content for E-commerce companies, but also to provide an understanding of the effectiveness of festive sales.