Self-Promoting: A Double-Edged Sword

This chapter aims to enrich our understanding of the speech actSpeech act self-praise performed in managerial responsesManagerial responses to hotel customers’ negative online commentsOnline comments. We argue that while the use of self-praise can potentially draw people’s attention to the positive attributes of the hotels concerned, it can also have an undesirable consequence—the damage of rapportRapport between the hotels and the customers. Drawing upon the construct of rapportRapport and its management, we conducted a textual analysisTextual analysis of 2,577 managerial responsesManagerial responses downloaded from the travel websiteTravel website TripAdvisorTripAdvisor. Our analysis indicated that the use of self-promotingSelf-promoting was potentially rapport-damagingRapport-damaging in four ways: (1) it threatened customers’ face; (2) it suggested managers’ ignorance of customers’ equity rights and interactional goalsInteractional goals, and/or their unwillingness to attend to such negative comments; (3) it failed to fulfill managers’ obligationsObligations; and (4) it suggested managers’ preoccupation with their own interactional goalsInteractional goals. The study can have significant contributions first to the academia by enriching the literature on managerial responsesManagerial responses to negative online commentsOnline comments, termed the review responseReview response genreGenre, and second to the hotel industry by making explicit the pros and cons of doing self-promotion in managerial responsesManagerial responses to negative online commentsOnline comments, allowing hotel managersHotel managers to produce responses that can better serve their intended purposes.