“Mocking people for stupid opinions is not fun. Also it’s bad for business.” From using humour for webcare to polarization

Abstract

Today companies are encouraged to communicate with a sense of humour when interacting with stakeholders online, and they increasingly take sides on contested issues by engaging in corporate social advocacy. While both approaches to digital business discourse may have benefits, they may equally polarize. This study explores the use of a digital discourse strategy that combines using humour with taking part in socio-political debates to find out to what extent their combination fuels polarization and entails negative outcomes. Using a corpus linguistic methodology, this study explores a 4.5-million-word corpus of tweets posted by and addressed to the budget airline Ryanair between October 2020 and March 2023, when the airline increasingly used aggressive humour and took a stance on socio-political issues in its posts. The findings show that the topics Ryanair engaged with, often in a humorous manner, entailed heated discussions on Twitter, with several words pertaining to the respective topics being key in the corpus. At the same time, they resulted in dividing its client base, with some stakeholders explicitly expressing their appreciation of its discursive approach and others deploring it. While humour may thus enhance the polarizing effect of corporate social advocacy, it may also lead to increased user engagement with stakeholders frequently commenting on and talking about brand posts. Ultimately, the success of a company’s digital discourse strategy will be influenced by the interplay between its brand identity, the context of communication and the specific type of user engagement behaviour it intends to spark.