Avoiding the brand for me, us, or them? Consumer reactions to negative brand events

Consumers react negatively to wrongdoings by brands. In this regard, managers often struggle to allocate their recovery resources effectively, as some consumers react more negatively to incidents that affect only themselves while others react more strongly to events that affect many people. In three experiments, we examine how consumers react to negative brand events (NBEs) that only affect themselves (i.e., personal scope) and NBEs that affect many people, including or excluding themselves (i.e., communal scope or external scope). Drawing on self-bias theory, we find that consumers experience stronger feelings of betrayal following an NBE with a personal (vs communal or external) scope, which in turn drives avoidance. We show that this effect may be mitigated if consumers are less self-focused (i.e., score low in grandiose narcissism or egocentric selfishness) or are from a less self-focused culture (i.e., collectivists). This research provides actionable implications for brand managers regarding NBEs

Don't be rude! The effect of content moderation on consumer-brand forgiveness

While it is a popular belief that venting helps unload frustrations about negative (customer) experiences, its effects on consumers' emotional states and consumer-brand forgiveness (CBF) remain to be explored. Given that a lot of customer complaints are made online, brands seem ambivalent about managing these public complaints without violating consumers' right to free speech. In two experiments, we find that writing a customer complaint increases negative emotions regarding an incident. Moreover, brands can mitigate this negative effect by asking consumers to moderate their speech—for example, with the help of a content moderation policy. Specifically, if brands impose restrictions on consumers' freedom to express their frustrations, essentially asking them for self-censorship, anger levels in their language decrease and CBF increases. We demonstrate that this effect is stronger for consumers with strong self-brand connection

Factors influencing the adoption of social media in service sector small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

Social media has turned into an internet marvel in recent years. This fast technological evolution and intensity of competition oblige companies to constantly looking for different ways to set apart themselves and offer added values to their customers especially in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The increasing popularity of social media has encouraged SMEs to start to consider this means as a new approach to communicate with clients and increase their brand reputation. In spite of the potential benefit and the developing numbers of adopters, previous studies show that only a few SMEs are concerned about social media adoption. Therefore, this forms a necessity to understand more on the factor influence in the decision making of the adoption in SMEs. Lack of literature review also creates another concern that require a thorough research. So the study will discuss the relationship between factors of influencing the adoption of social media in SMEs service sector. The data collected for this study was done by using online survey strategy. This study used 384 as a sample size with a population of total 809 126 Malaysia’s SMEs in the service sector. From the result obtained, the three factors identified: ease of use, usefulness and trust have a significant relationship with adoption while usefulness is most contributed factor in the adoption of social media. This finding will be a valuable data in assisting new entrepreneurs in adopting appropriate social media for their business

Adoption of Digital Collaborative Networking Platforms in Companies: A Study of Twitter Usage in Finland

Digital collaborative networking platforms have become increasingly important for companies. They are widely used for communication and co-creation with customers, suppliers and other actors in companies’ value chains. This study takes one social media platform: Twitter, as an example of a digital collaboration platform and analyses patterns of Twitter usage among Finnish companies. The empirical part of the study is based on survey data (n=554 companies) and Twitter usage data of 107 of the same companies. The research data is analyzed to find the extent to which companies have adopted Twitter and for what purposes it is being used. The results of the study show that surprisingly few companies have a Twitter account and most commonly companies use Twitter to communicate about news and events to the large public. Hence, plenty of opportunities remain for taking social media platforms more efficiently in use for collaborative networking and co-creation

Country-of-Origin Effects

Chapitre n° 7.International audienc