Complaining to the Masses: The Role of Protest Framing in Customer-Created Complaint Web Sites

Consumers who once might have voiced their dissatisfaction with a firm to a few friends and acquaintances are now constructing Web sites to tell the world about their dissatisfaction. Protest-framing theory reveals the interlocking rhetorical tac-tics (injustice, identity, and agency framing) consumers use to mobilize mass au-diences against a firm, contributing important insights to our understanding of negative word of mouth. Moreover, an analysis of protest sites reveals that con-sumers “frame ” their corporate betrayal to the public to demonstrate their power to influence others and gain revenge. As a result, a community of discontent may arise in which both individual and social identities appear to be constructed and affirmed. Consumer complaining is changing from a private to apublic phenomenon. Consumers who once might have voiced their dissatisfaction with a firm to a few family mem-bers, friends, or acquaintances are now taking their com-plaints to the first mass media easily and cheaply available to the public, the World Wide Web. Consumer complaining on the Web ranges from short posts to the focus of this article, Web sites that customers construct to tell the world about their dissatisfaction with specific firms. These com-plaint sites provide insight into how consumers interpret or “frame ” personal grievances as injustices that the public should oppose, as well as suggest their motives for com-plaining to the public. When consumers address this broader public, they can no longer rely on a social tie to make their personal dissatis-faction relevant to another, as they might when providing negative word of mouth (NWOM) to acquaintances. Thus, they may realize the need to present their grievance as an