Image Repair or Self-Destruction? A Genre and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Restaurants’ Responses to Online Complaints.

Customers are today becoming more and more reliant on online reviews before making their buying decisions. TripAdvisor platform, in particular, has become a first stop for holiday planning. User-generated contents have acquired the huge power to influence companies’ popularity and thence their economic performance. Firms cannot generally get negative comments removed, but TripAdvisor grants owners the opportunity to publish a reply. Complaint response represents a critical part of a business’ customer relationship management. The present study called into question the way restaurants exploit such medium, by investigating management replies to negative comments in the UK (tripadvisor.co.uk) and Italy (tripadvisor.it). The paper considered a corpus of low score reviews left on the website about properties situated in the capitals of the two countries. Genre and corpus-assisted discourse analysis were applied to examine the owners’ attitudes toward criticism in the two different cultural contexts. The research focused on the rhetorical moves and the language exploited by management to try to defend reputation by rebuilding trust or, instead, by imposing the firm’s contrasting point of view. The study revealed that British restaurants tend to use impersonal, polite and professional responses to criticism, while Italian owners often show an improvised, direct, emotional—and even angry—management of negative comments.