When Connection Turns to Anger: How Consumer-Brand Relationship and Crisis Type Moderate Language on Social Media

Social media offers brands the ability to gauge consumer reactions to marketing and brand crises. While social media listening has focused on aggregate patterns, consumers differ in how they react to a crisis faced by a particular brand. Analyzing consumer behavior for 39 brands pertaining to 77 brand crises through the lens of consumer posts on brands’ Facebook pages, we find that consumers’ prior online interactions with the brand and the nature of the brand crisis moderates the language they employ in their posts. Specifically, these factors affect the extent to which consumers express anger and the familiarity of their language. While consumers who have not engaged with the brand previously employ more familiar language and self-referencing following values-related crises compared to consumers who have interacted with the brand, these individuals express more anger after performance-related crises. In contrast, consumers who have previously interacted with the brand express more anger in the wake of values-related crises. We discuss the implications of our findings for brand managers using social media posts as a means of monitoring consumer perceptions.