Sentiment analysis and change: a case study of evaluating user perceptions during international companies’ rebranding

The article presents a sentiment analysis of the process of rebranding international companies in Russia following their withdrawal from the local market after 24.02.2022. The comparative analysis of social media content related to two pairs of companies (McDonald’s / Vkusno I Tochka; Zara / Maag) showed different patterns of users’ sentiments about the change. This is a pioneering attempt to explore to what extent social media analysis methods and tools can shed light on rebranding processes. This research demonstrates the potential for conducting such types of studies, but also to highlight the still existing imperfections in terms of sentence-level opinion assessment, especially in non-English texts.