Public reaction to tax avoidance - an analysis of electronic word of mouth

In the modern world, the communication crisis is a business nightmare that can blow millions of dollars investing in the brand in a matter of moments. Many causes can create communication crisis such as quality of product, service or external events. The Luxembourg Leaks was an excellent opportunity for us to investigate the level of user interest in business tax issues and the subsequent impact. The question is whether consumers care about the social responsibility of the business or focus on issues directly related to users’ benefits such as product launch or marketing campaigns. Answering this question will help businesses to come up with a reasonable strategy to maximize the power of the brand and minimize the impact of online communication crisis in a limited resource. By analyzing more than 700000 Tweets about the top 10 US companies related to the Luxembourg Leaks (November 2014) in previous periods, during and after this event, we demonstrated that the Luxembourg Leaks increased user interest in tax issues. However, without changing the content and the total number of tweets of users about the brands during the survey period, this event did not create a communication crisis. Also, we found a significant correlation between tax tweets and the number of negative tweets over that period. By analyzing the data, we point out that consumers pay more attention to the launch of new service products, media programs than for tax scandals.