Crocodile-tear apologies are characterized as “pretend” apologies that customers perceive as insincere. We analyze the impact of crocodile-tear apologies on participants’ loyalty intentions after a service failure in an electronic word-of-mouth context. When there are controllable service failures our results suggest that crocodile-tear apologies weaken the detrimental efects on the loyalty intentions of customers who observe such service failures. For customers directly afected by, and for observers of, uncontrollable services failures, complete apologies are more efective. Our results imply that in the electronic word-of-mouth context, easily standardizable crocodile-tear apologies might serve as an alternative apology strategy.

中文翻译：

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鳄鱼营销：“鳄鱼撕裂”道歉对患者忠诚度影响的实验研究

鳄鱼泪道歉的特征是被客户认为是不真诚的“假装”道歉。我们分析了电子口碑传播后服务失败后鳄鱼泪道歉对参与者忠诚度意图的影响。当存在可控制的服务故障时，我们的结果表明，对于那些观察到此类服务故障的客户，忠诚度低的鳄鱼道歉会削弱其忠诚度。对于直接受到无法控制的服务故障影响的客户以及对于无法控制的服务故障的观察者而言，完全道歉更为有效。我们的结果表明，在电子口碑的背景下，易于标准化的鳄鱼泪道歉可以作为替代道歉策略。