Aggressive humour as a means of voicing customer dissatisfaction and creating in-group identity

Abstract

Companies increasingly utilize social media for marketing campaigns to project a successful business identity and attract new customers. While the affordances of such participatory websites allow customers to consume what companies generate on their corporate profiles, the comment-posting platforms also permit customers to support or undermine the corporate messages. In other words, companies lack complete control over their self-representation. Drawing on a corpus of about 70 interactional instances collected from two social media platforms of a state-owned transport company, the paper investigates the use of aggressive humour by online participants wishing to oppose company's public portrayal. The analysis demonstrates that participants employ humorous posts to highlight the inadequacy of the services supplied by the company. In so doing, they often align with each other in denigrating the company and creating an in-group identity. This, in turn, distorts the company's desired identity, spreads negative word-of-mouth and further reinforces negative stereotypes about the company.