Complaining with emojis: Some conceptual and analytical aspects

Abstract

Building on existing taxonomies of consumer complaint behaviour, this paper categorises people who post their complaints to organisations’ official social media sites as ‘social irates’. This paper proposes two methodologies for analysing emoji-based complaints. The first is an emoji-based metric that is easy for both marketing managers and researchers to implement and interpret. The second methodology adopts a network approach for understanding and representing the use of emojis by dissatisfied consumers. By demonstrating that these emojis contain valuable data, the proposed methodologies offer insight into complaining consumers’ thoughts and feelings. The emoji-based metric and the network approach could be extremely helpful for researchers and marketing analytics professionals seeking to understand what complaining consumers are trying to communicate when using these little digital icons.