Brand local: Consumer evaluations as commodity activism on Yelp.com

Abstract

This project explores consumer evaluations on Yelp.com as ''commodity activism'' -the politicization of market activities for the purposes of social change and/or cultural resistance. A textual analysis of consumer evaluations (n ¼ 1972) and interviews (n ¼ 18) reveal that commodity activism on Yelp most commonly appears as a positive bias toward localism. Consumers discursively construct an aesthetic of authenticity around localism that functions in accordance with the logic of corporate branding; in turn, ''brand local'' is appropriated by reviewers as part of their own authentic ''self-brand'' grounded in the civic duty to one's community. The implications of this logic are critiqued against commodity activism's commitment to individual, personalized forms of self-empowerment over identification with larger collective and community struggles. In this sense, Yelp is favorable to neoliberal discourses of consumer capitalism, where consumption serves as a stand-in for citizenship and localism's political potential reconfigured in market terms.

Branding the Self on Yelp: Consumer Reviewing as Image Entrepreneurship

“…Certainly, Yelp users appropriate the tools and resources the platform makes available in order to construct their own "authentic" displays and expressions. These practices can at times push back against the commercial nature of the space by violating the terms of service or content guidelines, by raising political critiques of consumer capitalism and so forth (Kuehn, 2015). Brand critique can itself be part of one's self-brand in certain cases, demonstrating the range of contested and negotiated meanings that Yelp enables.…”

Brand activism

“…Popp, Horbel and Germeln (2017) performed another relevant and more specific study on social media movements against sports teams and brands for political or environmental reasons or for betraying their "essence." In the same vein, Kuehn (2017) holds that the opinions shared by the users of digital platforms fall into the category of "apolitical" when referring to the defence of local businesses against the expansion of multinational brands.…”

A Conceptual Framework for Investigating Organizational Control and Resistance in Crowd-Based Platforms

“…While Yelp promotes empowerment and transparency through its online review system, the terms of service disallow users from including civic or political discourses in their reviews [35]. Kuehn describes how some participants on Yelp "monitored and flagged political reviews that did not fit Yelp's terms of service" [36], which limited the discursive agency available to users in their evaluations on Yelp. This bureaucratic rule, enforced through self-policing, suppressed and filtered reviews deemed inappropriate by Yelp.…”

“…Moreover, the study of self-policing at Yelp [36] suggests that some control mechanisms work in concert with each other (i.e., bureaucratic and socio-ideological) to encourage some users to flag content that deviates from what Yelp considers appropriate. Effectively, a control system was devised that encourages some users to flag and remove content that deviates from organizationally appropriate standards.…”

“…Yet, examples presented in this paper illustrate the struggles emerge over defining what kind of content is appropriate [36,35] or resisting the material impacts of crowdsourcing technologies [33]. Research adopting a critical perspective [14] to organizational control in crowd-based platforms could provide valuable insights into these issues.…”