THE ROLE OF AI SENTIMENT ANALYSIS IN SHAPING MARKETING DISCOURSE

Sentiment analysis, a core capability of AI, involves processing natural language to detect emotions, opinions, and attitudes and, typically, classifying them as positive, negative, or neutral. This technology is used in marketing to analyze big data sets of consumer feedback (reviews, social media posts, survey responses, etc.). The goal of this paper is to examine how sentiment analysis interprets consumer language and influences a company’s English-language marketing discourse with an eye on economic outcomes like engagement or sales, through a case study of a single Coca Cola marketing campaign, because Coca-Cola is a company whose use of AI in marketing strategy and real-time consumer engagement is well-documented. This is done through a corpus analysis of English-language consumer texts and Coca-Cola’s marketing responses – in order to uncover patterns, shifts, or trends, after which a sentiment analysis is performed on the preprocessed data, which allows for a linguistic analysis of the data than can then be linked to economic outcomes.