The Influence of Negative Emotions in an Online Brand Community on Customer Innovation Activities

With Web 2.0 increased user participation in diverse e-communities results in prevalence of information, including emotional information. We examined the influence of negative emotion in an online brand community, MyStarbuckIdea.com developed to collect diverse customer ideas for firm´s innovation, with the purpose to investigate how such emotion affects customer innovation activities in the community. We first established several hypotheses on the relationships between discrete negative emotions and innovation activities. Then, having collected 84,918 customer ideas, we conducted POS tagging and term-based matching to calculate the inclusion and intensity of negative emotion, using negative emotion lexicon which we developed. As a result of testing hypotheses with regression models, we show that 1) negative emotion significantly affects innovation activities in the brand community and frustration is the most influential among the discrete negative emotions; 2) as the intensity level of negative emotions increases, so does their influence.