The Influence of Negative Emotions on Customer Innovation Activities

With the advent of Web 2.0, increased user participation in diverse e-communities resulted in an abundance 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 the firm?s innovation, with the purpose of investigating how such emotion affects customer activities for innovation 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 the negative emotion lexicon which we developed. As a result of testing our 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; and 2) as the intensity level of negative emotions increases, so does their influence.