Medical device companies crisis communication response to stakeholders during COVID-19: pre-crisis stage to new normal

Abstract

Purpose During COVID-19, this study aims to evaluate the crisis communication strategies (CCS) of Fortune 500 medical device businesses. These companies’ CCS adoption is evaluated using data from the microblogging site Twitter. Design/methodology/approach A total of 11,569 tweets were collected over the course of a year, from 31 December 2019 to 31 December 2020, and analysed using COVID-19’s pre-crisis, crisis and new normal stages. The data acquired from Twitter is assessed using latent Dirichlet allocation-based topic modelling, valence aware dictionary for sentiment reasoning sentiment analysis and emotion recognition analysis and then further examined using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to build a configurational model. The findings were compared to Cheng’s (2018, 2020) integrated strategy toolkit for organisational CCS, which included 28 strategies. Findings With positive sentiments across stages, companies chose “information providing”, “monitoring” and “good intentions” as the CCS. In the crisis and new normal stages of COVID, the emotion of “depression” was observed. Research limitations/implications Researchers would be able to assess the CCS used through visual aids in the future by conducting a cross-industry examination using image analytics. Furthermore, by prolonging the study’s duration, long-term changes in the CCS can be investigated. Practical implications Companies should send real-time information to their stakeholders via social media during a pandemic, conveying good intentions and positive sentiments while remaining neutral. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to investigate the CCS patterns used by medical device businesses to communicate via social media during a pandemic.