The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

Camilla Vásquez

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474269254
• eBook ISBN: 9781441196842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Discourse of Online Reviews is the first book to provide an account of the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical features of this rapidly growing form of technologically-mediated communication. Examining a corpus of over 1, 000 consumer reviews, Camilla Vásquez explores many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this new, user-generated, computer-mediated and primarily text-based genre. She investigates the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on various subjects and as they evaluate and assess their consumer experiences. She also demonstrates how reviewers display their awareness about emerging conventions of the very genre in which they are participating. This book adopts an eclectic approach to the analysis of discourse, and explores topics such as evaluation, identity and intertextuality as they occur in online reviews of hotels, restaurants, recipes, films and other consumer products.

1

An Introduction to Online Reviews

Today, nearly everything is ‘rateable’ and ‘reviewable’ online. From restaurants to recipes, movies to diaper bags, hotel rooms to high-speed blenders – it is now possible to find online reviews for just about every type of consumer product and service. Over the last decade, the number of consumer reviews posted on the internet has exploded and, as a result, today there are literally billions of reviews that can be found on a variety of websites. Because of this, increasing numbers of people are consulting online reviews in their consumer decision-making processes. According to a major survey conducted in the United States a few years ago, nearly 60 per cent of Americans surveyed indicated that they had used reviews in researching a product or service online (Jansen 2010). Without a doubt, this proportion has continued to grow, especially as we are now able to connect to the internet with more types of portable electronic devices.

And yet the online review seems to have rapidly evolved into a communicative genre that many of us have come to take for granted. In other words, it has become ‘naturalized’ (Barton and Lee 2013, p. 2). We may pause to scan a few hotel reviews before booking a trip, or skim a few reviews before choosing which brand of household product to buy, but most likely, we rarely stop to think about the numerous linguistic choices that were involved in the actual construction of those texts. For some people, online reviews may seem like a very basic, or even banal, form of writing. However, I believe that because the online review is a computer-mediated genre that so many of us read, interact with, and – in some cases – even produce, it is important to study systematically the language that is characteristic of this genre. To date, online reviews have been studied by scholars in fields such as marketing, economics, tourism, computing and information sciences. However, online reviews have remained relatively unexamined in language and discourse studies. This book seeks to address this gap and to describe and analyse online reviews from a discourse perspective. Throughout the following pages, I consider questions such as: What are some of the common discourse features used by reviewers to evaluate a product or service? What can an individual reviewer’s linguistic choices tell us about who they are? In what ways do reviewers use language to engage their readers? What structures of personal narratives do reviewers rely upon as they ‘story’ their experiences?

One of the main arguments for what makes online reviews important to study is their economic impact. Businesses have taken a keen interest in the massive influence of online reviews. One popular writer in the field of marketing claims that online reviews are far more powerful than traditional forms of advertising, exhorting business owners that ‘No amount of marketing or advertising that you will ever do can compare to the viral power of your audience as they share their experiences and impressions of your business online’ (Cockrum 2011, p. 5). Consumer reviews can be very good for business. Prior research has shown a positive relationship between review valence and sales (Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011; National Public Radio 2008); in other words, products that have received positive reviews online tend to sell better than similar products without positive reviews. Obviously, positive testimonials from consumers can reinforce readers’ faith in the quality or value of a particular product. What is even more interesting, though, is the research which indicates that negative reviews of a product can also help to increase sales. In particular, as one team of researchers has observed, ‘reviews that rate products negatively can be associated with increased product sales when the review text is informative and detailed. This is likely to occur when the reviewer clearly outlines the pros and cons of the product, thereby providing sufficient information to the consumer to make a purchase’ (Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011, p. 1510). By drawing consumers’ attention to the existence of a brand or product type that they may not have been aware of otherwise, negative reviews, especially ones that are rich in detail, are actually better for product sales than no reviews at all, lending support to the common-sense aphorism that ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity.’ Whether reviews are primarily positive or negative in their orientation, evaluation is clearly their primary function. In Chapter 2, I explore some of the linguistic resources that reviewers use to evaluate products and services and to construct their experiences as positive, negative or neutral.

Before continuing, it makes sense to pause and ask: What do we mean by ‘online consumer reviews’? According to one definition, online customer reviews are ‘peer-generated product evaluations posted on company or third party websites’ (Mudambi and Schuff 2010, p. 186). Electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM) is another term for internet-based consumer reviews. Used primarily by scholars in the international marketing community, eWOM has been defined as:

Any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet. (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004)

In a world characterized by unprecedented mobility and growing interconnectivity, it has become very common to rely on the eWOM of strangers, which can be freely and easily accessed on websites comprised of enormous user-generated databases. For instance, TripAdvisor, the most popular travel website today, has over 100 million reviews. Access to such an enormous amount of first-hand, user-generated information was unthinkable only a few decades ago.

eWOM differs from more traditional forms of word-of-mouth in a number of important ways. For instance, traditional word of mouth is usually spoken, not written, and therefore reaches a much smaller, and more local, audience. In contrast, eWOM is characterized by both scalability and speed of diffusion. In other words, ‘Information technologies enable opinions of a single individual to instantly reach thousands, or even millions of consumers’ (Dellarocas et al. 2004, p. 3). Furthermore, traditional word of mouth is ephemeral, whereas eWOM usually leaves some type of lasting digital record. eWOM can also be considered a quintessentially ‘late modern’ form of interaction, in that it centres completely around practices of consumption (Benwell and Stokoe 2006), and takes place in a technologically mediated form, between an author and a potentially vast audience, both of whom are – and will most likely remain – unknown to each other in an offline sense. Yet, this reciprocal anonymity does not render reviewers’ identities irrelevant. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Reviewers’ identities are very much of interest, and of use, to readers of online reviews. Some studies have found that users are sensitive to reviewers’ expertise, as well as to their possible motivations for posting a review (Sen and Lerman 2007; Vermeulen and Seegers 2009). This means that a more thorough understanding of the types of identity information that readers can infer about online reviewers, as well as the linguistic resources used by reviewers to position themselves as certain types of people, are matters which merit closer investigation. Consequently, I will take up the topic of the discursive construction of reviewers’ identities in Chapter 3.

At the time of writing, online consumer reviews are primarily a text-based, asynchronous (and very often, anonymous) genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC). They can also be considered a form of ‘social media’. In the last few years, researchers interested in language and discourse online have turned their attention to a wide array of social media, including blogs and wikis (Luzón 2012; Myers 2010), social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter (Page 2010, 2012; Zappavigna 2012), text messaging (Tagg 2012), reader comments to online newspaper editorials (Neurauter-Kessels 2011), online film reviews (Taboada 2011), online real estate advertisements (Pounds 2011), comments posted in response to YouTube videos (Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011), as well as others (Barton and Lee 2013; Page 2012; Seargeant and Tagg forthcoming). In some respects, online consumer reviews are similar to several of these other forms of social media, in that they, too, are a form of digital, user-generated content. However, online review sites differ from some other forms of social media, because the social ties between participants tend to be weaker on review sites than on most social networking sites, for example. In this respect, most online review sites can be characterized as more ‘information-focused’ communities rather than ‘relationally-driven’ communities (according to the dimensions of online communities proposed by ‘netnography’ pioneer, Robert Kozinets 2010, p. 36). However, that is not to say that the relational aspect is absent from online reviews. On the contrary, even anonymous reviewers use discourse in ways that forge personal connections with their readers. Therefore, in Chapter 4, which centres on involvement and intertextuality in this genre, I explore some of the specific ways in which reviewers use language to carry out relational work in online consumer reviews.

Who writes reviews, and why?

Online review writers can be considered ‘prosumers’. First coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in the 1980s, the word ‘prosumer’ has come to mean a blurring of the roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Prosumption has been described as a salient characteristic of Web 2.0., and sociologists Rizer and Jurgenson (2010) explain that prosumers are individuals who create value for companies without receiving wages. Thus, posting content on websites without remuneration can be viewed as a form of prosuming. In addition to the large proportion of individuals who consult online reviews, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly 25 per cent of the individuals surveyed reported having posted online reviews themselves (Jansen 2010). This statistic provokes questions such as: What motivates people to write and post their opinions in online reviews? Who would be willing to produce free content for these websites? Why do some people choose to engage in this form of ‘prosuming’?

Several attempts have been made to answer these questions. For example, a study by marketing and media researchers Hennig-Thurau et al. (2004) identified 11 distinct motivations that consumers may have for posting online reviews, ranging from more altruistic reasons related to helping others, to reasons having to do with expressing frustration, such as the venting of negative feelings towards a company. Their 11 motivations are summarized in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Motivations for posting online reviews (from Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004, p. 44)

Motivation	Explanation
concern for other consumers	altruism, providing advice for others
desire to help the company	often the result of consumer satisfaction
social benefits received	related to participating in and being a member of an online community
insertion of power over companies	negative comments from consumers can shift power from companies to consumers
post-purchase advice seeking	soliciting additional information from other consumers who have also purchased the product
self-enhancement	driven by one’s desire for positive recognition from others, being viewed as a consumption expert or intelligent shopper, being a ‘top reviewer’
economic rewards	some review platforms offer material rewards for reviewers
convenience in seeking redress	the convenience of complaining is important in the consumer’s decision of where to complain
hope that the platform operator will serve as a moderator	especially true when the consumer has been unable to reach the appropriate individual of the company involved in a dissatisfying exchange
venting of negative feelings	a desire for catharsis; can help reduce consumer’s feelings of discontent stemming from a negative experience
expression of positive emotions	it is believed that even very strong positive experiences may lead to feelings of imbalance; balance can be restored by writing and posting positive comments

Another study, conducted by sociologists Pinch and Kesler (2011), surveyed 100 of some of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers. The...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction to Online Reviews
• 2 Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience
• 3 The Discursive Construction of Reviewer Identities
• 4 Interacting with Others and with Other Texts: Involvement and Intertextuality
• 5 Digital Narratives of Personal Experience: Narrative Structures and Dimensions
• 6 Summary and Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright