Keyword cloud (02/07 - 02/09) B. Keyword cloud (24/7)
Figure 4: Keyword cloud analysis for Pak’nSave

Trends, Crises, and Opportunities (2020)

The story of Walmart in the US in 2018 is a good basic example for a temporary social media crisis. On July 3, a Twitter influencer, Ryan Fournier, a Donald Trump supporter, denounced certain products in Walmart online. The baby and adult apparels were printed “Impeach 45” or “Impeach Trump.” The post got many replies and retweets and snowballed to a brand crisis and spread globally (Ladd, 2018). Supporters of Trump used social media to express their frustrations and initiated a “boycott Walmart” movement online. Walmart quickly made a statement and removed the relevant products before the situation got worse. The mentions of Walmart soared from 8.6 k on July 2 to 40.6 k on July 4 before the topic quickly cooled down. The number of mentions had returned to 8.5k in three days. The date of the peak value of mentions was the second day after Walmart put the products on the shelf. Therefore, it is important to listen to the variation of mentions in social media to help companies identify a crisis and reach quickly. Understanding online consumer sentiments is an important element of detecting emergency trends.
In 2020, interest in online shopping rose in New Zealand during March. Certain milestones are important: 21 March (the introduction of the alert level system in New Zealand and the imminence of lockdown limitations) and 25 March (the coming of the nationwide lockdown and common perceptions around potential product shortages). According to Figure 5, interest in online shopping peaked on April 2, and then slowly dropped after then. Although the number of cases in New Zealand was still rising, the slowdown in panic buying could be attributed to the public’s increasing satisfaction with the government’s response to the pandemic and a relative decrease in fears around food shortages.