Complaining to the Masses: The Role of Protest Framing in Customer-Created Complaint Web Sites

Abstract

Consumers who once might have voiced their dissatisfaction with a firm to a few friends and acquaintances are now constructing Web sites to tell the world about their dissatisfaction. Protest-framing theory reveals the interlocking rhetorical tactics (injustice, identity, and agency framing) consumers use to mobilize mass audiences against a firm, contributing important insights to our understanding of negative word of mouth. Moreover, an analysis of protest sites reveals that consumers "frame" their corporate betrayal to the public to demonstrate their power to influence others and gain revenge. As a result, a community of discontent may arise in which both individual and social identities appear to be constructed and affirmed. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The effect of social media communication on consumer perceptions of brands

“…Even brands that have high consumer-based brand equity are targets for negative WOM and undesirable content from Internet users. Negative content, which may be based on fact or on malicious intent (Ward and Ostrom 2006), is a potential threat that may reflect on the consumer's overall perception of brands (Bambauer-Sachse and Mangold 2011). Dissatisfied consumers may use social networking sites to review products and make public complaints to the company (Sen and Lerman 2007).…”

A conceptual stages-of-growth model for managing a social media business profile

“…Failure to formalise usage policies for internal/external social media use also has unintended consequences (Aggarwal et al, 2011;Bott et al, 2009;Forrester, 2012;Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010;Munene and Nyaribo, 2013;Piskorski, 2011;Ward and Ostrom, 2006). Social media has a 'dark side' that leads to 'abuse, addiction and misuse', reducing productivity, as well as an increasingly 'strained computing and network resource' and 'misrepresentation' due to staff failure to distinguish between personal and business use (Munene and Nyaribo, 2013: 149).…”

“…a failure to adapt to the pace of rapid growth (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). a failure to manage negativity and critical comments (Ward & Ostrom, 2006;Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). a failure to adequately control the system (Damsgaard and Scheepers, 1999;Duane & Finnegan, 2003;Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).…”

The effect of social media interactions on customer relationship management

“…However, social media also provides users with a platform to voice negative customer experiences (Hennig-Thurau et al 2004). For instance, 50 % of social media users express complaints regarding brands at least once per month (The Nielsen Company 2012), which changes customer complaints from a private to a public phenomenon (Ward and Ostrom 2006). Using social media platforms, consumers can cheaply voice their dissatisfaction, easily reach a large audience and, consequently, effectively harm the brand (e.g., Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006;Elsner et al 2010).…”