Hi,

This is far away from my area... 

But a quick recommendation is that you look at the bibliography of other reviews such as teaching evaluations...

Good luck !

MK

Good advice, thanks a lot

Hi Efthymios,

I think this is an interesting phenomena of our time in one hand it is almost impossible to stop this kind of blackmail practice and, in the other hand, it would be difficult to distinguish authentic bad reviews from the ones that are not ethics.

One topic that seems interesting to me is to study the reaction of the customer to the bad reviews. Reading customer reviews about the product and services as well as about the retailers that sell them is becoming part of the digital literacy. One research question that would be interesting to research is how the customers process this information and how the assign trust to this kind of reviews within a set of reviews. Some variables that I think could be useful to include in the study (made through survey to a customer’s sample):

- Expertise of the customer with Internet in general and with e-commerce in particular

- The type of product or service

- Some kind of reputation of the author of the bad review and/or the usefulness of the review. Some review sites provide some kind of this information or allow users to see the full set of reviews made by by the author. It is a good guess that the users that consult this review history for the authors of bad reviews (or even very good ones) are trying to inform themselves about the truthfulness of the author

Another topic of interest is to investigate good practices or policies of retailers in respect of how to deal with this reviews: to do nothing, to write a counter-rerview (of what kind)…And to see how customers react to this policies.

I hope this ideas will help you.

Best regards,

Toni

Dear Toni,

thanks a lot for the very interesting answer. The reason I look for such literature is that an article in one of the biggest newspapers here in Holland last week identified a lot of cases that customers are blackmailing restaurants or hotels with bad reviews if they get no discounts or refunds. I also have a personal experience of such complaints and questions as to how to react in such cases by business. I am wondering if there is any research on how extensive this phenomenon is, in what branches and what are reaction patterns possible. There is a book by Gillin and Giangorte (Attack of the Customers) with many practical cases on the topic but with more emphasis on prevention. There are also several studies (mainly form consultants) indicating that the influence of social media / customer reviews on buying decisions is high. See for example http://www.slideshare.net/vdimauro/the-social-consumer-study

I agree that we need more scientific evidence on this point and the research you describe can be a very interesting one. On the other hand I am afraid that there is no research at all on the malicious use of customer reviews I described above and their effect on businesses who actually feel blackmailed. In that respect I agree with you that there is a need for investigation of best practices and policies 

Many thanks for the help

Efthymios

Hello Efthymios,

Companies risk a lot if they ignore consumer feedback, regardless of motivation and/or veracity. Once it's published, however, it's nearly impossible to retract. There are a few ways to deal with this:

1) Make a tough decision to vet posts and give private responses first. There has to be accountability, though, on the part of the company to post nearly everything, good or bad, that comes through once vetted. There is nothing like building and maintaining trust networks to endure a troll's attack.

2) Encourage existing trust networks, whether in social media or trusted brand names, to vet the company's product. The majority of consumers are going to give more weight to names familiar to them, and most are largely informed enough to be familiar with trolling.

3) Finally, no matter what, publish acknowledged errors front and center with an apology and maintain transparency and update while making it right. It's all about building so much trust, the numbers defrauding the company's site disappear in the minds of the legitimate consumers. Restitution is allowed only to those that share personal information needed to do so, not the anonymous, so the benefit of the doubt is affordable up to the 3rd time. At that point, cut them loose explaining it is clear they are not a match for the company and vice versa. Being public about that--except personal info, of course--is a positive, as well, as it defines the way the company does business even-handedly.

There are several case studies on the subject if you google them. I  would suggest using these to build a multi-case study that can really pin down the answers you need.

Article Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the str...

Many thanks for the advice, the article is also very interesting indeed

Hi, Efthymios;

I think you will find this concept interesting for what you're looking for!  A recent study (Cheng & Lou, 2014) argued that Elaboration likelihood model (ELM) routes and outcomes lead to the occurrence of distributive justice as moderating variables. Also the authors highlighted that compared with conventional complaint handling methods, posting a response that adopted a central route to persuasion was found to be most effective for handling negative reviews!

Please take a look at this article:

Cheng, V. P., & Loi, M. K. (2014). Handling Negative Online Customer Reviews: The Effects of Elaboration Likelihood Model and Distributive Justice. Journal Of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 31(1), 1-15.

Hope this helps!

Nadeem

Thanks a lot, it is a very good tip

Hi,

I study consumer-citizen participation in advertising, being digital media feedback management one of the new challenges for brands. Take a pick to some of case studies. Maybe you find extra inspiration.

Melo, A. D. and H. Sousa (2013). Feedback nightmare: Organisational communication reactions to digital critic exposure. A view on some Portuguese cases (2011-2012). Organisational and Strategic Communication Research: European Perspectives. G. Gonçalves, I. Somerville and A. Melo. Covilhã, UBI, Labcom: 95-110.

http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/book/104

http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/book/104

Thanks a lot, this is the kind of material I look for

Greetings