Fausto Pacicco

Literature suggests that the marketing discipline is facing a reputational crisis due to the common idea that marketing is a dangerous art, bad for consumers but good for businesses. Previous studies have investigated consumers’ attitude towards marketing, describing a drastic deterioration of the status of the marketing profession over the past twenty years. Via a machine learning “Transformer” model, an in-depth sentiment analysis of 19988 tweets has been carried out, aiming to better understand the Italian public perception of marketing on Twitter. If on the one side findings confirm the existence of a marketing’s image issue, on the other side the same results highlight positive sentiments, as many consumers seem to be fascinated by marketing practices and aware of their social and economic value. Therefore, this research suggest that the marketing’s good reputation can be restored and the study’s results could provide useful insights to stakeholders (e.g. marketers, academicians, and decision makers) in order to better plan strategies and develop new initiatives that may have a positive impact on firm’s image, its positioning on the market and, consequently, may improve the reputation of marketing