Brand local: Consumer evaluations as commodity activism on Yelp.com

Introduction

In 2011, a New Jersey bridal shop owner allegedly denied service to the bride-to-be of a same-sex wedding on the moral grounds that gay marriage is “wrong” and illegal (Gibson, 2011). As media attention to the story spread, people from around the United States took their protests not to the shop’s storefront but to the social web; in particular, hundreds flocked to the consumer evaluation website Yelp.com to negatively rate and review the business over the alleged discrimination. Within days, consumers posted over 1400 one-star reviews (out of a possible five stars). Most encouraged a boycott, while others reported similar experiences with the shop’s owner; a majority of criticism, however, came from consumers who had never stepped foot in the store.

In recent years, consumer evaluation websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Urbanspoon have become popular spaces for the public registration of consumer opinion. Drawing on the democratizing promises of Web 2.0, review communities claim to challenge the power of traditional reputation managers via unfettered discourses through and about consumption. Yelp, for example, advertises itself as a “review democracy” where “‘Real People, Real Reviews’ … democratize the reputation of business” (Sutel, 2007: n.p.). Even as they reinforce conventional ideologies of consumerism, review communities can also serve as a platform for “commodity activism” (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012) – politicizing consumption as a form of social action or cultural resistance.

What follows is a case study of how Yelp is utilized in commodity activism. Merging traditional business directory information with a search engine, consumer-generated reviews and social networking features, Yelp’s stated purpose is to “connect people with great local businesses” (Yelp, 2014a) which it achieves by encouraging reviews of small, independently owned establishments. Structurally, this occurs through the site’s regionally specific communities of participation; though international in scope, each Yelp “community” features a geographically localized search engine, “Talk” forum and designated Community Manager.

Drawing from literature on branding, localism and commodity activism, this research responds to Banet-Weiser’s (2012) call to take seriously the ways in which contemporary market activities are configured in political processes. The following textual analysis of consumer evaluations and reviewer interviews reveals the range of discursive agency that Yelp users embed into their reviews. A central tenet is that Yelp’s distinctly local focus positions the site as a politically efficacious space for commodity activism centered on the discursive performance, practice and authentication of localism. More than just a guide to consumption, both Yelp and users co-construct meaning around local businesses as “authentic” cultural spaces that in turn, is harnessed in the construction of an “authentic self.” Through this process of cultural and self-production, however, “localism” is symbolically structured within brand logic. Stripped from its roots as a political philosophy, localism is (re)articulated through the strategies and language of traditional branding practices to function in accordance with the commercial imperatives of market capitalism and neoliberal notions of the entrepreneurial (and authentic) self. The implications of this logic are discussed in the context of Banet-Weiser’s (2012) critique of commodity activism as a commitment to promoting individual, personal forms of self-empowerment over identification with larger collective and community struggles.

Local 2.0

Although digital networks have been long celebrated for their ability to transgress global boundaries of time and space, the social web has been equally productive in connecting users to the communities in which they work and live. In the past decade, local search engines, business directories, civic projects and neighborhood watch groups have attempted to bridge offline and online interactions across varying spatial boundaries (e.g. regional, hyperlocal, microlocal, mobile/locative). These “local 2.0” services resituate the productive capacity of digital media users in a distinctly location-based context (The Young Foundation, 2011), while harnessing the “holy grail” of untapped advertising revenue from small and local business. Between 2009 and 2010 alone, venture capitalists reportedly spent $115 million (USD) on location-based start-ups (Miller and Wortham, 2010). Locally based consumer evaluation sites emerged from these developments as an “integral part of consumers’ local commercial activity” (BIA/Kelsey, 2010); anywhere from 70 to 97 % of internet users now consult the web before making purchases or utilizing services in their local area (Ante, 2009; Pattison, 2009).

As one of the most popular consumer evaluation sites in the United States, Yelp ranks 30th in most visited websites (Alexa, 2014). Featuring over 53 million reviews across 20 countries (Yelp, 2014a), Yelp emerged at a time when “communities” are no longer defined spatially (by residence, geography or location) but socially – a shift enabled in part by globally networked technologies and larger structural changes to the sites of social identification under advanced capitalism (Piselli, 2007). However, Yelp has also gained popularity in a time when localism has resurfaced as an important political and cultural value. As a political philosophy, localism is about rescaling politics at a localized, place-based level; it presumes a higher degree of efficacy and autonomy in the ability to address economic, social, environmental and political issues (Clarke, 2013; Parkinson, 2007). In the 2000s, for instance, England’s “New Localism” movement promoted subnational governance as affording decentralized control, local autonomy and democratic control over local identity (Morphet, 2006: 317; Pratchett, 2004). While arguments in favor of localism persisted, they have been subordinated in the context of economic restructuring, globalization and the expansion of transnational corporate capitalism since the late 20th century. The loss of (local) community as a primary site of identification has been widely associated in critical scholarship with the political economic transformations of post-Fordism and neoliberalism and has factored predominantly in critiques surrounding the decline of civic life, “glocalization,” media/cultural imperialism and related threats of Western cultural homogenization (e.g. Banet-Weiser, 2012; Bauman, 2001; Giddens, 1991). ¹ The “turn inwards” exemplified across a number of political, economic and cultural spaces can thus be understood as one discursive strategy, among many others, that attempts to reorganize governance, improve democratic accountability and mitigate risks posed by decades of neoliberal violence and wider political economic changes.

Noting the post-industrial shift from mass production/consumption to a niche-based marketing regime, Banet-Weiser (2012: 130) argues that the contemporary political economy provides “a context that is rich for branding and interpellating consumer citizens as activists.” One needs only to look so far at the growing “localvore” movement, which reorients consumption behaviors to support locally grounded democratic practices as a form of “micro-resistance” to neoliberal globalization and the unsustainability of consumer capitalism (Andrée et al., 2014). Marketers, too, have provoked an array of discourses that suggest a shifting social zeitgeist in which “living local” is the “new global” (Faith Popcorn, 2010; Rubin, 2010). Signifying a range of pre-modern associations about community and public life, localism’s broader appeal relies primarily on the (false) nostalgia of a more “authentic” past – assumptions with deep implications for how the meaning and value of social life and identity is conceptualized in present times.

The process by which “localism” is socially constructed resonates with the larger set of discursive practices and strategies inherent to 21st century brand culture. Here, digital networks, branding and localism intersect and elide as “a logic of networks, access and affective relationships” replace traditional markets in the broader commercialization of culture (Banet-Weiser (2012) citing Rifkin: 45). In this era of “cultural capitalism,” culture comes to exceed materiality as notions of capital are transformed from the material (e.g. goods, money) to the immaterial (e.g. concepts, ideas, and images). Consumer evaluation websites, for example, exemplify cultural capitalism’s “affective turn,” where personal expressions, relations and practice take primacy over the actual consumption of things. Based on the “immaterial labor” (Lazzarato, 2000) of consumers who create and circulate meanings around commodities through interactive participatory networks, it is the culture produced around a particular good – rather than the material product itself – that resonates most in the contemporary consumption experience: “[T]hese types of brand relationships have increasingly become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity and affective relationships” (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 4). As brand culture is built on affective expressions that exceed material goods or services, focus is redirected toward how consumption is experienced or makes one “feel.” Sites like Yelp thus provide a space for co-creating, accessing and living through a local “culture” that can be consumed as an experiential commodity.

Locally oriented social platforms like Yelp should be understood in a complex web of factors that include not only technological innovation and market expansion but a historically specific political-economic and cultural context. Importantly, localism is not the only discursive practice responding to the global political economy. As merely one response to the broader global risk society (Beck, 1992), localism shares similar tenets with other “counter-hegemonic” modes of consumption aimed at mitigating the hazards and insecurities of modernity by moving back to a smaller, local scale – for example, fair trade, anti-sweatshop/fair wage campaigns, organic, ecological sustainability and other forms of ethical and political consumption. Although these campaigns compete for the attention of mainstream consumers, they claim similar goals: reducing environmental waste or harms, bridging producers and consumers, democratizing consumption and so forth. While the focus here is on localism, it is from within this matrix of competing and complementary moments that both localism and consumer evaluation sites emerge as financially viable, attractive sites of meaning-making and identification.

Consumer reviewing as commodity activism

The possibilities for resistance and activism afforded by consumer evaluation sites are dependent on the (relatively) unfettered discourse about brands, goods and services. The production of talk or other social activities can effectively shape local culture, corporate dominance, consumer knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. Critiquing, endorsing and/or rejecting local goods or services ostensibly circumvents reputation managers by usurping, rewriting or reinforcing carefully cultivated brand images. Shared personal experiences can thus inform and influence the decision-making processes of others with direct implications for local economies. To theorize consumer evaluations as commodity activism, however, means taking seriously the ways in which “the endorsement or rejection of commercial goods and services” are “associated with the expression of political will” (Papacharissi, 2010: 91). For sure, expressions or practices associated with commodity activism are oftentimes rife with contradiction and paradox – evidenced in the attempt to resolve environmental problems via (over)consumption, the corporate appropriation of cultural resistance, and so on. At the same time, consumer evaluations’ potential to enact social change also depends on the techno-social affordances of participatory web cultures. Analyzing the political potential of consumer evaluations through Dean’s (2005) theory of “communicative capitalism,” for example, means acknowledging that one’s opinion or experience does little more than enable a circuit of endless chatter that elicits little imperative to respond. While it is possible that changing the discourse around consumption can facilitate changes in practice, such transformations are unlikely to occur in the absence of some on-the-ground, coordinated politics. From Dean’s standpoint then, consumer evaluations alone are neither a form of resistance nor democratization so much as they are made productive for capital under the guise of participatory politics.

The citizen and the consumer have long been relegated to oppositional spheres of public and private activities and vastly different value systems. However, recent histories of consumer culture readily acknowledge that the public/private and citizen/consumer have never been wholly separate (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Cohen, 2003; Micheletti, 2003). Critical feminist scholars were among the first to note the ways women have effectively used the marketplace to agitate for political rights and gender equity (Jubas, 2007), while boycotts (and their obverse, buycotts) have mobilized buying power around the redistribution of power and equality for a range of ecological, political, economic, social, and cultural issues at local, national, and global levels. Motivated by goals of collective action, feminists, civil rights activists, immigrants, and other social groups have fused purchasing decisions with civic virtues to lobby for equal access, social justice or to advocate for the full rights of citizenship. Contemporary commodity activism is thus grounded in a legacy of consumers making intentional choices “with the goal of changing objectionable institutions or market practices” (Micheletti, 2003: 2).

Yet as Cohen’s (2003) history of consumer politics demonstrates, consumer citizenship has evolved over the 20th century from a discursive practice oriented toward collective empowerment (often leading to larger systemic welfare reforms) to a much more individualistic process in which consumption functions as a stand-in for citizenship. Contemporarily, “good citizenship” is actualized within a consumerist framework of economic rationality and entrepreneurialism that focuses on individual as opposed to collective interests, expressed in everyday decisions and practices such as what, where and how one consumes. This heightened sense of individualization is embodied in the rise of “lifestyle politics,” whereby the personal and political converge as part of the reflexive project of the self (Bennett, 2004). As traditional modes of identification decline (e.g. class, religion, political affiliation, religion, local community), lifestyle and social movements intersect, as the way one consumes becomes “a useful way to carry often radical ideas into diverse personal life spaces” (Bennett, 2004: 104). As a discursive practice articulated through neoliberal modes of governance, rights and liberties are lobbied for – and thus granted by – the marketplace as opposed to the state. In this sense, consumer citizenship situates politics within the market as opposed to outside the market, preserving consumer culture’s orientation toward individual desires and self-interest over the collective good.

As expressions of lifestyle politics, the proliferation of boycotts, cause-related marketing, ethical consumption and celebrity activism exemplify modes of commodity activism “in which realms of culture and society once considered ‘outside’ the official economy are harnessed, reshaped and made legible in economic terms” (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 1). However, privileging commodity activism as a desirable form of (self-)governance problematically assumes that everyone has equal access to the marketplace; where every dollar spent is equal to one vote, it is clear to see how some populations and social groups with more purchasing power ostensibly have more “political” power, or, conversely, restricts political participation to those who can readily afford it. The same applies to the public sphere as well, where political campaigns financed by profitable corporations or other private interests have considerably more influence over political decisions than traditional democratic procedures like voting. ² Importantly, then, commodity activism assumes we cannot evade the market but rather can change it by engaging, agitating or demanding more equitable, fair or socially beneficial practices. The goal is not to limit or reduce consumption but to steer it in new, desirable directions. Such practices are a trenchant reminder of capitalism’s ability to consistently and effectively reinvent itself and why resisting the logics of contemporary capitalism seems increasingly futile. For this reason, Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser (2012) suggest it is time that critical scholars stop relegating citizenship and consumerism to oppositional spheres of activity in the attempt to reclaim what it means to “do activism” in neoliberal times. Rather, they suggest that “marketized modes of resistance” must be taken on a case-by-case basis to evaluate how and “whether such interventions have any ‘real’ power to make social change” (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 3). Heeding their recommendation, this research aims to take seriously the ways in which consumer reviewers engage Yelp as a space for commodity activism, while critically interrogating localism’s discursive construction as a (potentially) political project.

Methods

This research explores Yelp as a site for commodity activism through a textual analysis of consumer evaluations and interviews with reviewers. Yelp was selected over competing evaluation sites because of its international popularity, active user base and community culture. Purposefully selected reviews from three categories encompass a range of affective associations (hedonic, utilitarian) from within the public and private sectors: “Food” (e.g. restaurants, grocery stores), “Health and Medical” (e.g. doctors, dentists), and “Public Service and Government” (e.g. libraries, utilities, historical landmarks). Locational filters narrowed the selection to three distinct community “types” – urban, suburban, and rural locations across the east coast of the United States.

Reviews were collected from the first page of the top 50 most reviewed business listings across each category within each designated community type, yielding the following number of reviews per category: Food (urban, n = 1361), (suburban, n = 371), (rural, n = 60); Health and Medical (urban, n = 75), (suburban, n = 52), rural (n = 3); and Public Service and Government (urban, n = 24), (suburban, n = 13), (rural, n = 13). A total of 1972 reviews were coded and analyzed across all nine samples. In-depth interviews with 18 active Yelp users (10 women, 8 men) were conducted between November 2010 and February 2011 around the United States via snowball sampling until no new themes emerged. Interview questions covered review practices, processes and perceptions, and how Yelp mediated or altered relationships with local communities. Participants were also asked to describe themselves as citizens and consumers and the relationship between reviewing and these subjectivities.

The method of qualitative textual analysis guided the coding, categorizing and development of themes (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005). The sheer volume of reviews in the data set (n = 1972) motivated this approach by providing a practical way to engage in content immersion. Reviews ranged from several words to several paragraphs, but a majority ran no longer than a few sentences. Entries were also quite consistent, featuring surprisingly little variance within any given review category, which helped alleviate the burden of coding such a large data set. Codes sharing notable commonalities were collapsed into categories, which continued to be refined throughout the analytical process until no new codes emerged (Baptiste, 2001: 10). Through the method of constant comparison (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), similarities and differences between data samples were assessed in the generation of themes. Constant comparison involves the systematic comparison of texts within and between their assigned categories “in order to fully understand the theoretical properties of the category” (Zhang and Wildemuth, 2009: 4); thus, themes across reviews and interviews were compared and contrasted, discarded, discounted, narrowed, expanded, refined and re-thought through all stages of the analytical process.

Consumer evaluations: Normative approaches

The normative approach to consumer reviewing on Yelp is, first and foremost, utilitarian. Evaluations predominantly supply basic information about a business or service – for example, product offerings (e.g. quality, ingredients, taste), selection (e.g. brand availability, variety), business information (e.g. hours of operation, directions), aesthetics (e.g. décor, presentation, layout), amenities (e.g. free Wi-Fi, valet parking, bathrooms), service (e.g. treatment, wait time, staff), price (e.g. cost, value), and history (e.g. business history, local/regional history). Interview participants reinforced these findings; when asked what constitutes a “good review,” most described reviews that provide “useful” information about an establishment. As summarized by one reviewer: “What’s most memorable, what’s notable, either good or bad … what I ate, what I thought of it.” Participants generally felt a good review aims to help others make better decisions. “Kelly,” ³ for instance, always includes dietary information for people like herself who suffer from food allergies; Jean-Luc suggests alternative establishments in order to “re-direct people to go to places that I feel are better.” When asked what purpose they believed their reviews served, participants generally shared the goal of warning, deterring and/or encouraging consumers to spend their money at particular places. As another reviewer put it: “If you’re reviewing a business and you’re reviewing it positively, you’re doing a favor to [the business]. If not, you’re doing a favor to everybody else.” Participants were committed to empowering consumers to make the best of available choices.

Reviewers often colored their experiences with celebratory accounts of the consumptive moment via two interrelated rhetorical strategies: personalization and affective expressions. In the former, evaluations narrate the consumption experience with details often unrelated to the business itself; instead, personalization functions to present the writer within a specific social status, taste culture and/or lifestyle by articulating qualities about the self. Personalization is typically coupled with affective expressions, embodying what Jenkins (2006) identifies as “lovemarks”: positive expressions about a particular company or commodity by brand advocates, fans or “inspirational consumers.” According to Jenkins, participatory web cultures like Yelp function on an affective economic model in which brand loyalty is invoked via expressions of passion and love (e.g. “I love this place, I truly do!”; “I love love love love love this bakery”; “I heart this place”). ⁴ Like personalization, lovemarks contribute to self-identification as a mechanism for presenting oneself as they convey social status, cultural capital, even habitus (Bourdieu, 1986). Here, personalization and affective expressions underscore the way consumption, meaning and identity are produced through the immaterial labor of consumer reviews.

Consumer evaluations as commodity activism

As a site for commodity activism, Yelp is, at best, a contested and negotiated space. Participants offered conflicting opinions about using Yelp in this way, ranging from outright rejection (e.g. “Oh, God; if [Yelp] becomes a political thing? I’m not going to be into it at all; it won’t be fun!”) to circumstantial:

As far as political things, unless somebody’s like, some true hate monger or something like that, it’s probably not going to impact me. I don’t care if you’re Democrat or Republican, gay or straight or whatever, how’s the food? That’s what I’m there for.

However, some reviewers saw their evaluations as intentionally or strategically political. Mark, for example, claimed to write evaluations with the expressed hope of “making people think … I mean if [Yelp’s] not a form of social activism to everybody, maybe it should be.” His regular reviews of non-profit organizations, corporate headquarters and public/government services, aimed to present “a sensibility that isn’t offered on Yelp”:

These issues affect me, they affect people I care about and yeah, I stick social commentary in there; it’s something I feel needs to be said … I mean I could just write, ‘Yeah, [this restaurant] rules, man’ but again, anybody could do that? It wouldn’t be interesting; I wouldn’t have as much fun doing it. I wouldn’t feel like I was doing some good.

Other participants described reviewing as a “public service” or, in several cases, their “job.” Few, however, discussed evaluations in political terms. Nonetheless, where reviews and interviews did take the form of commodity activism, it occurred via two interrelated strategies: the endorsement of socially responsible shopping and a positive bias toward local consumption.

Consumer reviewing and the politics of consumption

As demonstrated, consumer evaluations attempt to empower the self and others through utilitarian, experiential celebrations of consumption. Localism – as a privileged discourse on Yelp – and socially responsible consumption are similarly promoted within these relatively narrow confines. In constructing a positive discursive bias toward localism, consumer reviewers felt they were harnessing Yelp to support their local communities, encouraging more diverse economies and preserving cultural landscapes. Even members who did not see the value of Yelp as a political platform recognized the site’s potential as a resource for local businesses fighting an uphill battle in a dual economic structure, although most refrained from explicitly anti-corporate critique in favor of a positive, pro-local bias. Social pressure also served as a means to promote localism and effectively minimize expressions deemed “too political.”

On Yelp, localism is discursively constructed as an experiential, consumable aesthetic that conjures certain “feelings” of connectedness produced by various factors – kitschy décor or atmosphere reminiscent of “simpler times”; the social status/familiarity of being a “regular”; or by reinstating producer-consumer relations lost to the modernization process. In the latter case, this “reconnection” between producers and consumers is, of course, one promised by contemporary brand culture generally – as an experience to be consumed rather than a distinctly political project. Signifying consumable qualities of a pre-modern past, localism guarantees an authenticity and “realness” that homogenized corporate culture cannot.

Ultimately, localism as a consumable aesthetic reconfigures a political philosophy around a vocabulary of markets, consumer choice and the self. As “brand local” comes to function in the domain of culture, it signifies a range of “authentic” life experiences that speak to “the way we understand who we are, how we organize ourselves and what story we tell ourselves about ourselves” (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 5). As demonstrated, the attempt to redirect economic flows toward the “local,” however, defined, is not about preserving a more democratic allocation of control over local markets; it is to preserve a local culture distinct from (i.e. authentic) the spectacle of mass consumption and ubiquity of corporate brands. In this sense, branding localism elucidates – as it also attempts to reclaim – fears concerning the loss of authenticity that characterizes contemporary consumer culture. In turn, this context – produced by the immaterial labor of consumer reviewers – serves to craft equally authentic life experiences and identities. While these processes may inadvertently effect local economies, cultures and democracies, the logic of brands always privileges individual relationships over the collective (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Meaning, the long-term implications consumer reviews have for localism are largely unsustainable so long as their influence is dependent on the fluid, unpredictable nature of brand culture that places the individual – rather than the larger social body – as the primary site of social identification, action and change.

Localism is, however, a useful construct for reconciling the contemporary ethos of personal responsibility with consumerism’s hedonic and affective dimensions as it signifies community, democracy and solidarity on the one hand, and authenticity on the other. Localism is appealing precisely because it articulates responsibility and authenticity, but in an apolitical way that preserves (Yelp’s) social norms. As an expression of taste and preference, localism is folded into the larger circuit of influence that reviews offer consumers who model their market behavior after identities they seek to emulate. Where these emulations cross into the terrain of politics mainly occur when such goals do not conflict with other personal or community imperatives.

Conflicts over the local and global, personal and political, individual self-interest and Yelp’s larger collaborative “networked public” are common tensions that both “run through brand culture and shape commodity activism” (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 38). As Jubas (2007) similarly notes, the primacy of residence to citizenship has long clashed with other considerations at the site of consumption, including the demand for fair prices, affordable goods, free trade and other considerations. These tensions surface across Yelp reviews where the desire for products conflict with environmentally sustainable conditions, to moments in which racial politics conflict with the “processes” required to sustain the reputation and validity of a cohesive networked public. Where individual and community interests collide, fetishizing consumption or writing politics out of consumption altogether – that is, the very practices that subsume localism within a brand logic – reconciles such problems.

Under brand logic, abstracting localism from its political origins resolves the ideological conflicts that commodity activism raises. Yelp’s official content guidelines also serve this function as they systematically reinforce the disconnection between production, consumption, localism and consumer reviewing by reifying the “normal customer experience” within the limited ideological constraints of consumer capitalism and empowered consumption. For example, Oliver reproduces Yelp’s official position that reviews are “not the place” for politics despite acknowledging that the social relations of production are indeed “political.” Despite his momentary reconsideration about Yelp’s potential for commodity activism, he, too, reifies the normal customer experience as an individualized, personal transaction; in doing so, what constitutes a “good review” is one that dislocates a collective orientation from consumption, stripping politics from the local. The potential for Yelp to reconnect consumers to their community thus ultimately serves to disconnect them from the politics that commodity activism otherwise suggests. The suggestion that there is a division between recognizing the politics of consumption and how consumers might take action to do something about them illuminates yet another conflict: If consumer reviews are not the place for commodity activism, then where is the “right” place?

Although such contradictions are inextricable from the way Yelp’s affective commercial model subsumes localism within a branded logic, the implications for commodity activism are vast. As the uncritical celebration of localism is naturalized as an inherently “better” option to global corporatism, this assumption enables the social relations of production to be quite literally written out of how participants think and talk about their local economies. As these relations are overlooked, local [political] economies are extracted from the global commodity chains of which they are a part (e.g. working conditions are not, by default, more equitable merely because they are independent of corporate ownership). In effect, participants fail to connect the politics of production, consumption and localism as mutually constituted phenomena. Similarly, where participants do connect knowledge of racial discrimination or exploitative work conditions back to local establishments, these relations are rationalized as irrelevant to the consumption and reviewing process. In other words, limiting commodity activism to the endless circulation of pro-local endorsements ultimately leaves corporate power uncontested and the global political economy intact. Paradoxically, the discursive production of localism as a brand strategy problematically abstracts its place within the larger political economy, and importantly, it does so while redefining localism as a seemingly “more” authentic consumer and cultural experience.

The positive bias toward local consumption also means discourse is re-directed away from corporate chains and thus does not amount to a significant form of public pressure. Instead, localism too falls under the constant surveillance of consumers as it is constantly evaluated, ranked, rated and critiqued. In this sense, consumer evaluations resonate with Dean’s (2005) critiques of communicative capitalism in which the democratic promise of participation situates digital networks as an empowering vehicle for social activism even as the overabundance of information forecloses upon the expectation of response. For Dean, the circulation of content is valorized more than the messages themselves, marking a form of “post-politics” that lacks the antagonism necessary to effect real, sustained social transformation. From this perspective, celebrating localism comes to replace on-the-ground government lobbies or the necessary public pressure that might urge corporations to adopt better, long-term environmental and labor standards. Branding localism ultimately raises a number of implications regarding localism’s political potential and sustainability. ⁷

Conclusion

This study set out to explore the range of discursive agency deployed in consumer evaluations on Yelp, and to understand how the site might function as a space for commodity activism. As evidenced, reviews are not so much written to collectively mobilize other locals around pressing social issues, democratic rights and responsibilities as spaces for expressing lifestyle politics. As such, Yelp is a useful resource for participating in the right kind of taste cultures and constructing an authentic self that conveniently points to – without actively or directly engaging – a range of political possibilities. As we live in a time where the culture of everyday life has been transformed into brand culture, supporting localism is appealing if only because it feels like a “distinctly non-capitalist” practice (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 135). As the uncritical celebration of localism circulates as a more authentic form of consumption, localism is transformed into a symbolic structure incorporated back into consumers’ own articulations of the self.

The approach outlined above is much different than a mode of commodity activism that agitates for political, economic, social and cultural rights, responsibilities, recognition and/or resources. Where consumption intersects with civic, ethical and moral duties, Yelp is, at best, a negotiated and contested space. Neither explicitly political nor inherently depoliticizing, lovemarks of the local are thus folded into a sign system that is ultimately more about choice, markets and the self than the collective attempt to improve social and/or economic relations.

As such, participating on Yelp is a model form of neoliberal citizenship in which one of the most important and pressing obligations is the task of privately empowering the self; by sharing consumption experiences, consumer-citizens empower themselves and others to successfully navigate the panoply of choices that contemporary capitalism makes available. However, the fact that so many reviews attempted to persuade consumers toward responsible or “better” consumption also suggests that people’s consumption practices are neither ambiguous nor ambivalent, but motivated by wide range of social, economic, political and cultural factors. Yet as Yelp’s business model depends on consumption for the production of reviews, like other forms of commodity activism the end goal is to steer (i.e. further) consumption, not to reduce or resist it.

The subsumption of localism under the logic of brand culture ultimately serves capitalist, not democratic, imperatives; it suggests that local markets are not caught up in global commodity chains as it provides some false promise that corporate capitalism, labor rights, global inequality and other social, economic and political issues can be redressed through new consumption patterns. The domain of consumerism now includes a commitment to localism: just as counter-cultural and anticonsumption movements depend on consumption, localism is also stripped of its political and collective goals as it is increasingly absorbed within materialist society. Future research might consider the range of other ways that local relations are economized within a brand logic, what constituent social groups might be absent from this process, and the implications this has for community, politics and culture more broadly.