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.

中文翻译：

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不要粗鲁！内容节制对消费者品牌宽恕的影响

虽然人们普遍认为发泄有助于消除对负面（客户）体验的挫败感，但其对消费者情绪状态和消费者品牌宽恕 (CBF) 的影响仍有待探索。鉴于大量客户投诉是在网上进行的，品牌似乎在处理这些公开投诉而不侵犯消费者言论自由权方面存在矛盾。在两个实验中，我们发现撰写客户投诉会增加对事件的负面情绪。此外，品牌可以通过要求消费者调节他们的言论来减轻这种负面影响——例如，在内容调节政策的帮助下。具体而言，如果品牌对消费者表达不满的自由施加限制，实质上是要求他们进行自我审查，那么他们语言中的愤怒水平会降低，而 CBF 会增加。