Making a Comeback: Organisational Recovery from Negative Online Consumer Impressions

Abstract

With the rise of the Internet and consumer-generated media, organisations are facing more pressures than ever before when managing consumers' impressions. The widespread availability of company information through sources such as company websites and customer review pages, poses enormous challenges for organisations to instil positive impressions amongst consumers, particularly in cases where negative information about the organisation is readily available. This research employs a cue diagnosticity approach to examine the manner in which consumers form impressions about organisations based on trait, behaviour and response information. It focuses on investigating the role that negative morality and ability information has in determining the effectiveness of organisational responses in instilling positive consumer impressions. Adopting an experimental approach, the empirical results from this study reveal that, when consumers form impressions about organisations, negative information related to the ability of the organisation is more influential and impactful than equally extreme information related to the morality of the organisation. Further analysis also evidences this strong negativity effect in the ability domain by showing that the effectiveness of an organisation's response in instilling positive consumer impressions is domain-dependent. More specifically, this research indicates that in the morality domain, consumers' impressions after the organisation's response are overall more positive regardless of the response adopted. This impression is more positive than the initial impression formed (based on positive traits), suggesting that when responding to negative morality information, organisations can in fact "make a comeback". When responding to negative ability information, however, consumers' impressions are more positive when an organisation responds with Redress than when an organisation responds with Apology. However, although responses to negative ability information instil positive consumer impressions, it is more difficult for organisations to "make a comeback" in this case.