How can brands mitigate the consequences of negative digital customer experience? Investigating roles of brand attachment, brand community support, and adaptive coping

Abstract

Customers, constantly in search of hedonic wellbeing, are increasingly interacting with brands on digital platforms. While doing so, negative digital experiences often reduce their hedonic wellbeing. However, the reasons and remedies for unintended consequences of negative experiences are not clear. We conducted three experiments to uncover how and when the impact of negative digital experiences on hedonic wellbeing could be mitigated. Our findings suggest that digital brand attachment is the underlying mechanism for the influence of negative digital customer experience on customers’ hedonic wellbeing. Both adaptive coping ability and online brand community support alleviate the undesirable influence of negative digital customer experience on hedonic wellbeing through digital brand attachment. However, adaptive coping and online brand community support have no effect on the direct relationship between negative digital experience and hedonic wellbeing, a counterintuitive finding. Our findings offer theoretical insights into how negative digital customer experience affects hedonic wellbeing, and by uncovering the underlying psychological mechanism; this research also demonstrates the boundary conditions for the relationship between negative digital experience and hedonic wellbeing. We offer remedies for firms to increase brand community support and design different redressal strategies for customers with distinct levels of adaptive coping.