Legitimacy of Negative Online Customer Engagement: An Abstract

The construct of online consumer engagement (OCE) has emerged as a key metric of social media marketing outcomes. Research has focused on positive OCE resulting in limited insight into negative OCE. It is important to address this gap since negative OCE maintains relationship proximity but exhibits intense antagonistic thoughts, feelings and actions towards the brand; which are manifested actively (unlike disengagement which is manifested passively) (Hollebeek and Chen 2014; Naumann et al. 2017). Examples of negative OCE include resisting firm-initiated communication (Gretry et al. 2017), posting abusive comments (Keashly and Neumann 2008), complaining (Presi et al. 2014), boycotting and revenge (Tuzovic 2010). We focus upon negative OCE as a lack of research attention means there is limited insight into the frustration and angry reactions present within the dark-side of social media (Gebauer et al. 2013; Hollebeek and Chen 2014). We focus upon customer and organisational negative OCE in a financial services setting. We draw on Institutional Theory (Suchman 1995) to evaluate the strategies that are employed to legitimise or delegitimize negative OCE discourse within brand-controlled social media page. We gather netnographic data from the customer service Facebook pages of eight retail banks and combined this with social media practitioner interviews from three of the banks. In our analysis we identify how Institutional Logics provide organising principles, a vocabulary of motive and identification of a sense of self for consumers and organisations within social media. This paper shows how banks and customers are strategically drawing on legitimacy dimensions to gain advantage through emergent practice and “establish legitimacy discursively in order to authenticate their roles” in social media (Leppanen et al. 2015: 2). There is evidence that of misalignment in customer narratives drawing on moral legitimisation strategies, external bank narratives drawing on regulatory and cognitive legitimacy whilst internal organisational narratives mobilise pragmatic legitimacy. The use of Institutional Theory highlights that OCE may be targeted at a broader network of actors than has been previously conceptualised.