Let Us Not Speak of Them, But Look and Pass? Organizational Responses to Online Reviews

In a world where five stars have become the standard for evaluating many transactions and consumers turn to the crowd for guidance when making a wide variety of choices, organizations cannot dismiss online reviews as inconsequential. And whereas we know a lot about how organizations respond to reviews online, there has been a lack of systematic evidence showing how organizations behave in response to online feedback once their screens are turned off. This paper leverages a novel combination of insights from a lab-in-the-field experiment, an archival study, and two rounds of qualitative interviews in the French restaurant industry to examine online and offline responses to reviewer feedback. We identify characteristics of the review, the restaurant, and the respondent that influenced when restaurants in our sample were more likely to align their actions online and offline and when they were more likely to decouple them—that is, posting an online response promising to take corrective action while having no intention to change how the restaurant operates “in real life.” We conclude by speculating on potential mechanisms behind our respondents’ reactions and discussing our contribution to the literature on producer reactivity and the symbolic management of change.