The research of Goizueta Business School’s Michael Lewis, associate professor of marketing doctoral area coordinator, and Manish Tripathi, assistant professor of marketing, made the front page of The Pittsburg Post-Gazette this past Thursday December 12th.
The article, titled “The black & gold blues: Steelers fans take losses the hardest in the NFL”, discusses Lewis and Tripathi’s recent study on fan emotions which shows that Steelers fans take losses harder than any other fan base in the National Football League.
The Emory Sports Marketing Analytics blog hosted by the duo explains how they conducted their research- by analyzing messages posted via Twitter after every game of the 2012 NFL season and then using an algorithm to categorize tweets as positive or negative. As reported by The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, “In the two day window that followed Steelers losses last season, 33.1 percent of tweets from the Pittsburg area about the team were positive, the lowest percentage of any NFL team.”
Lewis and Tripathi’s work is part of The Emory Marketing Analytics Center (EmoryMAC) – formed out of the revolutionary change in the field of marketing, a change driven by two somewhat related factors. First is the change in the fundamental approaches to marketing driven by new interactive technologies. The second is the emergence of potential new data sources and analysis techniques that have the potential to allow marketers to better understand marketing phenomena and to improve marketing decision-making.
Beyond scholarly research, EmoryMAC also hosts innovative conferences and student courses all aimed at fostering “a new direction for marketing.”
-Meredith Farahmand
