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Abstract
In spite of the prominence of social media within sport marketing and increased attention from researchers, very few studies have looked at the linguistic makeup of social media content in sport. The values and emotions a company tweets convey important information about brands and marketing efforts. The research used two studies to computationally analyze thousands of tweets from four baseball teams and four apparel companies. Results show unique relations between values and emotions across both baseball teams and apparel companies. As an example, Nike communicated the value sense of accomplishment-a positive value-significantly more than any other apparel brand, but it was also the least positive apparel brand from an emotional perspective. Additional results and future research directions for sport marketing researchers are discussed.
Keywords: values, social media, linguistics, emotions, marketing
Introduction
The New York Yankees have 1.26 million followers on Twitter ("New York Yankees (@Yankees) I Twitter," 2016) and have sent out 25,200 tweets while Nike has 5.95 million followers and has sent out 22,900 tweets ("Nike (@Nike) I Twitter," 2016). These numbers illustrate the broad reach of social media and its increasing role within sport. From using social media as a brand building tool (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011; Kim & Ko, 2012) to using them as a platform to interact with fans (Mahan, 2011), social media represent a "whole new ballgame" (Pieper, 2013) for sport marketing. Social media offers marketers the opportunity to communicate specific values while analyzing the linguistic makeup of their messaging to ensure their communication is consistent. Given the popularity of social media and the moment-tomoment nature of the messaging, compared to more traditional marketing methods such as billboards and advertisements, social media represents an interesting lens to study sport communication. In spite of the prominence of social media within sport marketing and increased attention from researchers, very few studies have looked at the linguistic makeup of social media content in sport to better understand how values and emotions are communicated.
Theoretical Framework
Values and Emotions
Research on means-end chains (e.g., Homer & Kahle, 1988; Reynolds & Olson, 2001) implies that social value words are among the most important in marketing. When consumers are asked why they purchased a particular product, they often answer with a product...