The Impact of Consumer Sentiment on Brand Reputation in the New Energy Vehicle Industry

With the development of science and technology, social media has become one of the sources that people give their opinions and exchange information. Currently, people’s choice of car usage starts to transfer to new energy vehicles (NEV) due to many reasons. This study collects mix of data: Gain consumer sentiment data through over 7000 pieces of comments about three brands of NEV on two social media platforms; Collect brand reputation indexes through questionnaires from over 200 respondents. Correlation analysis, sentiment analysis derived from textual data and regression analysis will be used to investigate the relationship between consumer sentiment and brand reputation of NEV brands. The results shown that there is a weak positive relationship between consumers’ sentiments and brand reputation index. However, the impacts on brand reputation by negative sentiments is not greater than positive sentiments, which point out the meaningfulness for future research on generalizability of negativity feedback and differentiation of industry-specific factors.