Participatory Culture

Outline Final Paper

Jan Henrik Thiemann

F030260

 

The meaning of customer reviews in the case of Amazon.com

 

 

My motivation: I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the system the online-seller Amazon.com uses to give customers the feeling of knowing everyones taste through various tools. Auctions, wish lists, recommendations and a specific system of guiding through interesting products offers a new “personal” shopping experience in an original unpersonal space as the Internet. One of the first things, which was offered by Amazon.com, and which is now used by  a lot of other online-sellers, is the use of customer reviews. This new form of online criticism made by amateurs but so important for the choice of other customers fascinated me (especially in its wide range from review-topics) and so I decided to choice this as my research topic.

 

The phenomenon: First I want to describe the context of Amazon.com which creates the background for the customer reviews:

Amazon.com was founded by the American Jeff Bezos and started in July 1995 with online-booktrade-market. From the first online-presence the idea of the company was influenced by the “founding commitment to customer satisfaction and the delivery of an educational and inspiring shopping experience” (see here )

Now not only books, but also CDs, DVDs, videos, toys and games, electronics, kitchenware, computer and a lot more is available for millions of customers in more than 220 countries around the world. Amazon.Com has agencies in the US (Amazon.com also in Spanish available) in Canada (amazon.ca), Japan (Amazon.co.jp), Great Britain (Amazon.co.uk), Germany Amazon.de), Austria (Amazon.at) and France (Amazon.fr). Amazon.com is traded on the NASDAQ at AMZN.

I have chosen the phenomenon of customer reviews on Amazon.com, because of the importance of this company. Amazon.com is a global brand. The customer-based principle including customer reviews functions in different cultures around the world. The Amazon-site has the same principles and functions whether you surf to the US, German, French or Japanese site. Amazon brought this new opportunity of online criticism to a broad range of users and uses it consequently to create their customer-related brand. This is accepted and acknowledged by a lot of Amazon-fans and users, for example see here:

(www.bunker306.com/amazon/amazon.shtml)

Because of this reasons, I choose the reviews on Amazon.com for my examination of online customer reviews.

 

My thesis is: Customer reviews on Amazon.com are not just a simple form of participation, but have different qualities for the organisation (Amazon.com) and their customers. In addition are these reviews not just participation but also a representation of the new role of the “active client” within our society.

 

Within my research paper I am going to look at three main questions?

 

1) From the customer side: What are the reasons for customers to write reviews? What is their motivation?

2) From the side of organisation: Why does Amazon.com offers such an opportunity? And how are these customer reviews used to create and maintain their brand image?

3) From a more general perspective: How does this kind of customer participation fit in a modern trend of the “active client”? How has the consumer-role changed?

 

 

To answer question number 1) I will first take a look to the objects themselves (the reviews) and analyse the reasons reviewers offer in their small personal accounts. (There are descriptions and personal pages on amazon.com, where the most “useful” and “worshipped” reviewers shortly describe their motivation and personal and working background). I will search for questions what “emotional benefit” is given to reviewers to spend their free time to write unpaid reviews. If a good theory about motivations for online criticism will pass my way, I would include it, but I have not found such an approach yet ;-)

 

To answer question number 2) I will how Amazon.com uses the customer reviews to stress their customer-friendly image. I will examine how important this factor was by creating this brand image and how it was fostered. In the case of organisation there are a lot of studies, interviews or articles which help me to find connections between the reviews and the brand. I also want to show how this non-organisational element guarantees Amazon.com attributes like neutrality or authenticity.

 

After looking at this small topic (customer reviews on a special online-seller) I want to wide up the focus and place this phenomenon within a social development. Look what customer reviews simply are: unpaid work by customers for Amazon.com simultaneously giving them authenticity and neutrality. But this is not a specific phenomenon but a social trend within the last decades.

In this last part of my research paper I will mainly use the work of Nicole Schreiter “Die Entdeckung des aktiven Kunden” (2003). This dissertation gives a good overview about theoretic models of the new active consumer (e.g. the model of the ‘prosumer ‘ by Michel or Toffler). In this context the phenomenon of “Mc Donalds” (McDonaldization) is mentioned as a emergence of active consuming. In the case of McDonalds you take your meal to a table, which you seek and bring your dish back, in the opinion of George Ritzer the starting point for consuming developments like self-service-shops or online-banking, where the customer does unpaid work, which was former done by the producer/organisation.

I use Schreiters general overview (maybe a few primary sources) because it combines many theories and the whole theoretical field is too complex for a short aspect of a research paper. But I will use this approach to embed the Amazon.com customer review phenomenon in a broader context. (Maybe I can this customer context also relate to the question of participation as labour, which it is indeed in the case of Amazon, related to the work of Uricchio and Jenkins, but this is a question of time and space and only an option for final and further thoughts about this topic). 

 

 

The relevance of my research is given, because customer reviews are now reality for a lot of realms in the Internet (books, films, music, technology). Because of the great role Amazon.com plays for the development of online-reviews in general, a detailed look on the double-sided meaning of these reviews may help to understand specific problems within this realm. If you understand the motivation for both sides of production and can draw a connection to social general developments in the customer role, this may help to understand the new customer-model and make aware for new changes or details within this market-process.

         

 

Tentative Literature:

 

Amazon.com:

• Gurbaxani, Virjay / Shrikande, Aarti (1999): Competing in Book Retailing: The Case of Amazon.com In: Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations I.T. in Business. University of California, Irvine, Papers 124

http://repositories.cdlib.org/crito/business/124

• Hof, Robert (2000) Jeff Bezos: There’s no shift in the model. In: Business Week, February 21, 2000

http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_08/53669094.html

• Kotha, Suresh (1998): Competing on the Internet: The Case of Amazon.com In: European Management Journal. Vol 16, No2, April, 1998, p.212-222
• Reimerdes, Gesine (2001): Amazon: Markenaufbau im Internet. In: Riekhof, Hans-Christian (ed.) (2001): E-Branding-Strategien. Mit Fallstudien von Amazon, Dell, Eddie Bauer und Otto, sowie Konzepten von Boston Consulting, Elephant Seven, Grey, IFM, Scholz & Friends and Unykat. Gabler, Wiesbaden p.240-247
• Sandeep, Krishnamurthy (2002): Case Study #1: Amazon.com – A Business History in E-Commerce Mangament: Text and Cases. South Western College Publishing
• Spector, Robert (2000): Amazon.com: Get Big Fast. Random House, Business Books, London/Sydney et al

 

Customer Reviews (on Amazon):

• Dafermos, George N. (2003): Blogging the Market: How weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations

http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/dafermos3.pdf

 

The active consumer:

• Schreiter, Nicole (2003): Die Entdeckung des aktiven Kunden. Eine Untersuchung zur Thematik der produktiven Beteiligung des Konsumenten am Dienstleistungsprozess im Kontext des sich wandelnden Konsums

http://archiv.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/2003/0118/data/Diplomarbeit_AKO.pdf

• Ritzer, George (1993): The McDonaldization of Society: An investiagtion into the changing character of contemporary social life. Thousand Oaks, Pine Press