Managing customer satisfaction after a product recall: the joint role of remedy, brand equity, and severity

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and manage post-recall customer satisfaction. In three studies, we examine the impact of firms’ remedy choice on satisfaction and provide evidence that firms’ post-recall remedy efforts are often not optimal. In Study 1 (field study), we estimate the longer-term effects of remedy on different satisfaction metrics and show that offering full remedy is much more important for low and high (vs. medium) brand equity firms, especially when failure severity is high. In Study 2 (experiment), we find further evidence that the positive impact of full remedy on satisfaction is moderated by brand equity in a u-shaped fashion. Finally, Study 3 (experiment) provides further evidence that the relationship between remedy and brand equity is contingent on failure severity. The findings contribute to the literature on firms’ management of negative relationship events and provide managers with the empirically grounded 5R guidelines to make better remedy decisions in response to product recalls

Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples

Measuring the Role of Uniqueness and Consistency to Develop Effective Advertising

Prior research on creativity and the effectiveness of executional factors in advertising has focused on the impact of uniqueness and consistency in comparison to prior and competitive advertising. Relatively little is known about the specific impact of these variables and their relationship to each other, and few existing measures of consistency and uniqueness extend beyond subjective rating scales. In this research, we develop new measures of advertising uniqueness and consistency. We use data from 10 years of Super Bowl advertisements along with panel data on word-of-mouth communication for the advertised brands (buzz) to demonstrate the validity of this methodology. Our findings suggest it is not the presence of any particular element but whether the element and what it is combined with are unique and consistent. Advertisements are likely to be more effective if they are unique from earlier ads for all brands but also consistent with ads for the same brand from prior periods