Brand warmth elicits feedback, not complaints

Abstract

Consumers perceive brands on their intended goals that can benefit or harm consumers. These warmth perceptions become consequential when a consumer experiences a product-harm incident. Conventional wisdom suggests that brand warmth may inhibit consumers from reporting such incidents to the brand and/or regulators. However, the authors’ analyses of field data show that brand warmth increases the number of reports of harm incidents. Yet consumers’ underlying motive is to provide feedback rather than complain. Indeed, using machine learning and regressions, and laboratory experiments, the authors demonstrate that brand warmth boosts the proportion of feedback (vs. complaint) reports. Next, they theorize and show that brand warmth induces consumer benevolence, which drives the consumer toward feedback (vs. complaint). Lastly, the authors demonstrate that if managers of a warm brand acknowledge the consumer’s feedback motive in their recovery messages, such acknowledgement enhances consumer satisfaction. The research extends the discipline’s knowledge on how a brand’s warmth perceptions impact consumers’ responses in the aftermath of a product-harm incident and what intervention managers can use in such a context.