Brand feedback to negative eWOM messages: Effects of stability and controllability of problem causes on brand attitudes and purchase intentions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2020.101522Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Brand feedback or response to negative eWOM/review can impact visiting consumers.

  • Brand feedback may not work when consumers think problems as stable/likely to endure.

  • Brand feedback may benefit brand- (vs. consumer-) controlled problems more.

Abstract

Research has shown negative product reviews or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) negatively influence consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. However, research has paid less attention to consumers’ information processing of negative eWOM in the presence of brands’ public response, or brand feedback. Findings from a between-subjects experiment indicate brand feedback can make the biggest impact on visiting consumers when addressing a brand-controlled and short-term problem. This suggests brand feedback cannot replace long-term quality considerations. The study contributes to our understanding of effects of online brand contributions and eWOM messages, and provides managerial suggestions about strategizing posting of brand feedback in an eWOM space.

Introduction

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) (e.g., online reviews) has received much scholarly attention and has been found to influence consumers' attitude toward brands (Lee et al., 2009) and purchase intentions (see for a review, Bhandari and Rodgers, 2016, Cheung and Thadani, 2012, Wang and Rodgers, 2011). However, eWOM conceptualizations have often ignored or undervalued an important component of the eWOM environment, i.e., the brand's ability to post feedback (henceforth called, “brand feedback”). The authors define brand feedback as a business’s written response to an eWOM message that seeks to reaffirm or uphold the businesses’ promise to meet the needs or desires of the consumer. Brand feedback posted online attempts to assist complaining consumers who may have posted negative eWOM in order to yield a positive influence on consumers who may consider some negative eWOM during their purchase decision processes. These negative statements via eWOM may reflect that the brand or its products do not fulfill a promise to satisfy consumers’ needs or desires.

For many years now, websites like TripAdvisor.com have been giving brands the option of providing feedback to consumer reviews or eWOM posted on its website. Online shopping sites that feature eWOM, such as Amazon.com, also allow brands to provide feedback to consumers who review the brand’s products. However, current definitions of eWOM (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004) often focus more on eWOM as an exchange of information between consumers, which may not consider the brand’s ability to participate in the eWOM context. Although brand feedback and its effects have been gradually gaining scholarly attention, thorough academic research is still lacking, leaving few tested guidelines for brands or businesses to strategize brand feedback. This limits the understanding of brand feedback’s effects and, thus, brands’ role and place in eWOM theory.

The current study seeks to fill this gap by examining the effect of brand feedback on consumer processing of eWOM messages, particularly consumers’ attitude toward the brand and purchase intentions. However, not all negative eWOM may carry equal cognitive weight in terms of information processing (Bhandari and Rodgers, 2016, Cheung et al., 2009, Cheung and Thadani, 2012). Thus, brand feedback effect is also likely to depend on attributes of the eWOM message, such as whether the problem consumers describe in the negative eWOM is of a stable nature (i.e., stability) or under the brand’s control (i.e., controllability). How do variables like stability and controllability affect brand feedback effects? Thus, the study investigates the interaction effect of stability and controllability on the relationship between brand feedback and brand attitude and purchase intentions. This is the study’s main contribution and adds nuances and boundary conditions concerning brand feedback effects. Results also offer practical insights on how brand managers can strategically use brand-controlled messaging opportunities to their advantage.

Section snippets

Risk as it relates to eWOM consumption

Perceived risk may be important to consider when it comes to eWOM consumption and, consequently, brand feedback effects. Risk here is defined as the probability of choosing to buy a product/brand that does not meet one’s needs/desires or fulfill its promise to deliver what it said it would deliver. Higher probability of choosing a poor product is associated with a “risky” purchase. Several studies show an important motivation for consumers’ consumption of eWOM is to avoid risk associated with

Experimental design

The study was designed as a 2 (Brand Feedback: Present/Absent) X 2 (Controllability: Brand-Controlled/Reviewer-Controlled) X 2 (Stability: High/Low) between-subjects experiment. This experimental design was selected to avoid a possible carry-over effect or possible sensitization of participants concerning the goals of the study. The study created a mock e-shopping scenario using Qualtrics. The product and eWOM messages were selected following a pretest with a small sample of college students (n

Manipulation checks

Five participants who did not complete all questions were dropped from the dataset, resulting in a total of 285 participants in the final analysis. A total of 84.6% of participants (n = 241) correctly identified whether they saw Sony’s brand feedback, whereas 15.4% of participants (n = 44) did not correctly identify whether or not they saw Sony’s brand feedback. In the brand feedback absent conditions, a total of 111 participants (77.6%) out of 143 correctly identified absence of brand

Discussion

In the backdrop of a growing industry trend of providing brand feedback to negative product reviews or eWOM, this study sought to understand the effects of brand feedback in the online retail shopping site context. We also investigated whether brand feedback to negative eWOM worked differently when the cause of the problem was either controlled by the company or general reviewer and whether the cause was stable (long-lasting) or unstable (short-lived) in nature. The first set of findings showed

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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