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Consumer Bullying in Online Brand Communities—Quantifying a Dark Social Media Phenomenon

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Marketing and Smart Technologies

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 279))

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Abstract

Whilst authors in the marketing literature have made some qualitative suggestions that aggressive consumer-to-consumer interactions (i.e., bullying) negatively affect users’ social media experience, there is no quantitative evidence to substantiate such propositions. Moreover, several studies emphasize that large brands such as Nike and Coca Cola are reluctant to get involved when consumer interactions turn hostile. Applying text mining techniques from computer science to a novel phenomenon in marketing, this paper aims to provide a quantitative overview of the prevalence and impact of bullying in online brand communities, and the potential effectiveness of brand responses. To this purpose, we scraped data from the official Facebook community of 14 retail brands (e.g., Lidl, Tesco) for a 3-month period, analyzed the content and sentiment of consumer comments that classified as bullying, and ran t-tests to measure the impact of a brand response. Analyzing a total of 49,866 comments, our findings offer detailed insights on the average bullying rate for retailers’ online brand communities and significant variations in bullying between these retailers. Furthermore, we show that bullying has a largely negative emotional impact on community users, and that a brand who responds to bullying can cause a substantial, positive sentiment shift. We thus offer theoretical and managerial contributions to the novel and under-researched ‘dark side of social media’ in the digital marketing literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, 18 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK

    Oliver Warke & Joemon Jose

  2. Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Gilbert Scott Building, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK

    Jan Breitsohl

Authors
  1. Oliver Warke
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  2. Jan Breitsohl
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  3. Joemon Jose
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan Breitsohl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maia - ISMAI, Maia, Portugal

    José Luís Reis

  2. University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Eduardo Parra López

  3. Suffolk Business School, University of Suffolk, Ipswich, UK

    Luiz Moutinho

  4. University of Maia - ISMAI, Maia, Portugal

    José Paulo Marques dos Santos

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Warke, O., Breitsohl, J., Jose, J. (2022). Consumer Bullying in Online Brand Communities—Quantifying a Dark Social Media Phenomenon. In: Reis, J.L., López, E.P., Moutinho, L., Santos, J.P.M.d. (eds) Marketing and Smart Technologies. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 279. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9268-0_54

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9268-0_54

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-9267-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-9268-0

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