Index

1.       Introduction                                                                  2

2.         The customer reviews on Amazon.com                                               3

3.         The reviewer perspective                                                                    4

3.1.      Meanings that create a value for a community                          6

3.1.1.   Reviews as community builders                                                           6

3.1.2.   A medium for sharing experiences                                                       7

3.1.3.   Altruistic meaning                                                                               8

3.2.      Meanings with individual values                                                           9

3.2.1.   Meaning of training                                                                             9

3.2.2.   Financial and promotional meaning                                                      10

3.2.3.   Status                                                                                                 11

4.         The perspective of Amazon.com                                                         12

4.1.      Service meaning                                                                                  13

4.2.      Public relations meaning                                                                      14

4.3.      Brand loyalty                                                                                      16

5.         Conclusion                                                                                         18

6.         Bibliography                                                                                       20

1.     Introduction

Amazon.com, one of the greatest online-retailers worldwide was founded by Jeff Bezos with the idea “[…] to make Amazon.com ‘the most customer-centric’ company in history” (Spector, 2000, p.136).  Since the enterprise was build in Seattle and started with the online-selling of books and CDs the customer-friendly idea stands in the focus of the whole organizational branding and marketing strategy of this company. On the Amazon website a lot of tools like a system of recommendations or private wish lists seek to create a sphere of a total new and completely personalized shopping experience. “Preference-matching engines are constantly gathering data about what I buy and what others buy; Amazon adds to that data preferences that I express”(Lessig, 2001, 132) is this system of described by Lawrence Lessig, who states: “But I doubt any of your friends know your tastes in music and books as well as Amazon knows mine“(Lessig, 2001, 132).

One of these options for a personal use Amazon.com offers is the possibility for customers to write own product reviews. So every registered customer of Amazon.com can write reviews about any article which can be bought via Amazon.com. Whether these are books, movies, clothes, computers or kitchen utensils, everything can be critically commented by everyone.

In this research paper I want to focus on these customer reviews and their different meanings they can have in different contexts. After describing the ‘phenomenon’ itself and how it is organized I will examine, what kind of qualities these reviews have for the people who write them. After that I will change the perspective from the customer to the organizational site of Amazon.com. I will describe what values and meanings the written reviews offer to the organizational site and how this ‘unpaid work’ of the customers can be seen in the terms of the organization and marketing context. Finally I am going to compare these two different realms of meanings of customer reviews and will try to place it in short in the general discussion of active consumer theories.

2. The customer reviews on Amazon.com

To every product, which can be bought on Amazon.com can be written a personal review by every customer who feels free to. The number of reviews is not limited and with this constant changing content, Amazon.com repositories attract over 14 million users every month (Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 9). At the moment Amazon.com has nearly two million volunteer reviewers,(Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 2) and except special awarded cash prizes for customer book reviews (Spector, 2000,142) the writing is completely uncompensated. Customers has to register, but can review anonymous[1], reviews are limited to 1000 words and they have to follow the editorial guidelines of Amazon.com.[2] The reviews are moderated and censored by a small group of Amazon.com-editors (Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 9) and a computer system. Beneath a textual review, customers can rate products on a five-star scale and can comment on how useful other customer reviews have been to them. Instead of giving a kind of reward (see above), Amazon honors the voluntary reviewing work through a kind of ranking, which is described by Subramani / Peddibhotla: “[…] Amazon ranks reviewers using a composite of the number of reviews submitted and the average number of helpful votes received by reviews”(Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 9).

3.     The reviewer perspective

This described ranking system which offers customers the possibility to describe themselves and their motivation is one of my basic sources for this chapter to describe and understand the different meanings of customer reviews. Subramani / Peddibhotla, who use the same source for their research, explain what the content of such reviewer profiles is:

“The profiles contained rich personal details that contributors revealed about themselves. This often included personal details such as where they lived, how old they were, details about their families and pets, descriptions of their professional careers, information on their hobbies, their interest, their passion and pet peeves, the factors motivating them to write reviews, personal life history, their favorite books and the music that they liked”(Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 9).

The level of information differs and some reviewers choose to stay anonymous, hidden through a nickname and an impersonal email-address.

Using this information I will try to define the meanings of these reviewers for the participating customers. I use the research Mani Subramani and Naren Peddibhotla have done, but my approach differs a little. Subramani / Peddibhotla examine in their analysis Quantity and quality: Understanding contribution of knowledge to public document repositories the motivation of users of Amazon.com to write customer reviews and seek answers to the question, what the quality of contribution drives.[3] Using this analyzed motivations my research will, in comparison to Subramani / Peddibhotla, shift the perspective and focus on the review itself. Comparable to the theory of affordances, Hutchby uses for media theory[4], I will try to describe the customer reviews as a kind of “medium” providing different meanings and values in different contexts. Leaving the personal perspective (motivation) and shifting to a model which put the object (customer reviews) in the centre and throwing light on its different meanings by changing the perspective, offers the great advantage, that these meanings are easier comparable to each other. If I concentrate on “customer reviews” the object has many facets, but remains stable, instead of focusing on motivation, which would change the whole condition of the model by shifting to other perspectives (as e.g. the company side).

As it is mentioned in the work of Subramani / Peddibhotla, the recognition of values of those public online repositories has taken place in scientific research, but there has been until now little effort to understand these motivational aspects of this phenomenon (Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 2) In the most articles about this phenomenon it is understood as an “emotional benefit” (Reimerdes, 2001, 243), gained through this form of participation. Only a few works in online-research try to describe the motives behind the participation in general. Amy Jo Kim using the offline-theories of Abraham Maslow offers in her book Community Building on the Web (2000) a general description of possible motives, which is summarized by Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman:

“Viewed in this context, we can assume that people are motivated to participate in order to achieve a sense of belonging to a group, to build self-esteem through contribution and to garner recognition for contributing; and to develop new skills and opportunities for ego building and self-actualization”[5]  

Using this bunch of motivations to understand the meanings of customer reviews leads to my two basic groups of meaning within this reviewer context: meanings that create a value for a community (e.g. writing a review to help other customers) and meaning that only has individual values for the reviewer. I hope that this basic distinction helps to define clearer the meanings of customer reviews on Amazon.com. I will start with the more obvious meanings, which includes values for users around the Net (the basic idea of the use of the Internet).

3.1.         Meanings that create a value for a community

3.1.1. Reviews as community builders

Basically, writing customer reviews brings opinions of people together, who have read the same book, listened to the same CD or watched the same film. This brings people together, who have some special interests or experiences in common and link them through a special reviewed subject.

As I can only assume, these links brings people together who would not normally search for a special community to this topic otherwise. Because of the fact, that a lot of reviewers have a broad range of interests[6], the reviews offer a link to other people around the world (in the case of Amazon.com mainly around the USA) who have joined the same product. This creates “a sense of community” (Spector, 2000, 141-142).[7] The growing content of this community of interest leads to a ‘virtuous cycle’, a kind of inner-community development, as it is described by Suresh Kotha:

“As this content growths, it attracts others to add to the richness of the mix, thus creating a virtuous cycle […]. In essence this is an explicit attempt to create a community around the needs for transaction” (Kotha, 1998, 217).

But the reviews are not only the starting point for this community of interests, this whole development is further fostered by Amazon.com through additions, described by Subramani / Peddibothla:

“Amazon.com allows a reviewer to develop and track a referent group by creating a ‘Favorite People’ list. When one of those people in this list writes a review or recommends something, Amazon puts it in the individual’s customized ‘Friends and Favorites’ home page. This allows the reviewer to keep track of members in his or her referent group and their opinions” (Subramani / Peddibothla, 2004, 9)[8]

So Amazon.com is not only an online-retailer, but also a starting point for finding the right community related to a favorite interest, or as it one reviewer literally describes: “Amazon is the true virtual book club”.[9]

3.1.2. A medium for sharing experiences

One subject closely linked to the idea of reviews as community builders is the sharing of experiences via reviews. Maybe you define this as an special point within this community-context (chapter 3.1.1), but I think this has not to be in every case, because “lurkers”, who just read without any other kind of participation can also share these experiences via reviews, although they are not a part of the community of interest.

This point of shared experiences is stressed by Amazon.com to find new participants (Gurbaxani / Shrikande, 1999, 11) and the reactions and descriptions from customers show, that this meaning of customer reviews is a strong argument for participation, e.g. as it is mentioned by reviewers: “[…] I am delighted to share what has always been a solitary experience with other people”[10], or “To know you share a love of a certain author, painter or musician is almost intoxicating at times”[11]

3.1.3. Altruistic meaning

Reviewing on Amazon.com is, except a few awards, a voluntary, uncompensated job (see chapter 3.2.2.). One of the key factors for describing volunteering is the term of altruism, “[…] defined as helping without expecting a direct reward” (Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 5). The motivating element behind this is empathy, which is “[…] identified as a key antecedent of the altruistic motive […] which in turns leads to helping”(Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 6).

Writing a customer review can have this altruistic quality: you can share your experiences and help in this way other customers trying to find the appropriate product. Customer reviews can highlight interesting niche products or warn customers who have wrong associations or assumptions about an article. In the self-description of the reviewers the altruistic motive is a strong one for their writing.[12] This altruistic meaning is in my definition a very wide category, because it sums up the wish to help, but also the helping quality it offers to the readers. It contains the aspect of reciprocity, too (the wish to help, after reading a helpful review), which is treated as an extra category by Subramani / Peddibhotla (Subramani/Peddibothla, 2004, 12).

3.2.         Meanings with individual values

Subramani / Peddibothla focus in their analysis on the customer’s motivation to write reviews on reasons, which can be placed in the wide realm of altruistic motives (e.g. empathy, reciprocity etc.). So it comes as no surprise that their definition of contribution focuses mainly on social characteristics, which finally produces benefits for a whole community. They state: “[…] repository contribution therefore represents uncompensated volunteering by individuals for the benefit of others” (Subramani / Peddibothla, 2004, 3).

To acknowledge this definition would neglect the fact, that customer reviews can also have three important meanings which are only valuable for the writers themselves, which I want to discuss in the following chapters.

3.2.1. Meaning of training

To write a review offers a kind of training qualities to the writers. As reviewers state, the writing sharpens thoughts by articulation or the limitation on 1000 words can help to sum up complicated connections.[13]

This shows “[…] that the activity of contributing a review an individual can improve one’s writing skills, organize and clarify the content of one’s thoughts about the subject, and provide an avenue for enjoyment”(Subramani / Peddibothla, 2004, 12-13). These training abilities are provided through the reviews on Amazon.com, because everybody can be a reviewer on this webpage. And in comparison to training at home for yourself Amazon-reviewers can clearly see how good their reviews are, through feedback or ranking of reviews in terms of helpfulness.

3.2.2. Financial and promotional meaning

First of all, customer reviews on amazon.com has a, although a very tiny, financial quality. Amazon.com awarded cash prizes for the best customer book reviews (Spector, 2000, 142)[14]

But more important is the promotional quality of customer reviews, which leads to a propagandistic benefit. If you look at the backgrounds of the Top 50 reviewers it is conspicuous that there are a lot of free-lance reviewers, authors, consultants or journalists. Their reviews lead to their profiles, where they promote own books or services.[15] A lot of reviewers try to put links to their own weblogs or homepages in their profiles, although it is forbidden by Amazon.com to use hyperlinks.

This promotional quality is not limited on profiles, but also the customer reviews itself are a pure medium of propaganda. Customer reviews on Amazon.com are mainly a promotion of something the author likes, and it is striking, that the five-star ranking (as the highest possible ranking) dominates the ranking practice, as it is clearly shown in the work of Admati / Pfleiderer (Admati / Pfleiderer, 2001, 1). The reviewers themselves explaining this behavior in different ways, but always with the same message.[16]

So these exclusive positive reviewing speaks also against an dominant altruistic approach, because only reviewing good things does not help other customers to protect against worse products. So this promotional meaning of customer reviews is one which shows clearly the exclusively individual value for customers for purpose of promotion or propaganda.[17]

3.2.3. Status

For Bowmann /Willis who  are trying to describe the possible motivations for participation in their research work of We Media, the key factor is gaining status or building reputation in a given community. This thesis is stressed by quoting Howard Rheingold (on his book Smart Mobs): “For some the ego-driven surface of this motivation is more practical underneath – people want to establish themselves as an authority on a subject”[18]

Writing an review about a special product obtains authority on this subject, because if you can review something you obviously have the quality to value. Also Subramani / Peddibhotla acknowledge this status meaning: “The possibility of recognition as a value reviewer represents the only formal incentive offered to contributors” (Subramani / Peddibhotla, 2004, 9) The status of the reviewer is strengthened through the whole reviewer ranking system Amazon describes as it follows: “The Top Reviewers list is our way of honoring the individuals whose honest, intelligent reviews help make Amazon.com a great place to shop”[19] This status meaning, as mentioned above, includes here the qualities to judge and value. Giving the customers the power to value products is according to Chris Locke (who is quoted by George N. Dafermos in his paper Blogging the market) the greatest innovation Amazon.com has brought to the Internet (Dafermos, 2003, 31).      

So if you write the first review, you simultaneously define its value and can be an opinion leader within this community of interests. These status meanings can be traced back to the comments of the Top Reviewers of Amazon.com. Writers mention the experience of rewriting something completely new and one reviewer under the nickname “Magellan” sees himself as a “true navigator through the world of knowledge”.[20]

These meaning of customer reviewers for maintaining or gaining a certain expert status highlights once again the individualistic character customer reviews can have and shows clearly the weakness of an only altruistic approach of online participation in the case of customer reviews.