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The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of service failure severity on brand forgiveness and to investigate the moderating effects of interpersonal attachment styles and thinking styles on the service failure severity–brand forgiveness relationship.

The authors used retrospective experience sampling to collect the data and structural equation modeling (AMOS 24) to analyze 570 responses collected via an online survey.

This study shows that the service failure severity–brand forgiveness relationship is not always negative, as different conditions may amplify or weaken it. Specifically, a secure attachment style and holistic thinking weaken the negative impact of service failure severity on brand forgiveness, whereas an anxious attachment style and analytic thinking negatively amplify the relationship. An avoidance attachment style did not appear to play a role.

This study should help hotels fine-tune their segmentation, targeting and positioning efforts and may also help in implementing more focused recovery strategies.

This study provides insights into the role of psychological traits in amplifying/reducing the negative impact of service failure severity on brand forgiveness, thus showing the importance of developing the psychological profiles of customers beyond demographic profiling. The emotional and cognitive typologies of consumers are key to understanding the dependence of forgiveness on service failure severity.

This paper aims to examine the role of brand attachment as a relevant construct in customers’ evaluation after they face a service failure which impacts future consumer behaviors. It mainly answers the research question: does brand attachment cushion or amplify the effect of service failure on customers’ negative emotions?

A 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design was conducted. Data analysis was performed with ANOVA and moderated mediation.

Customer’s feelings toward a brand (brand attachment) that existed before a service failure occurred can regulate customer’s negative emotions especially when consumer attribute service failure to a controllable cause. This process minimizes the effect of service failure in customer’s satisfaction and consequently increase customer behaviors like word of mouth and loyalty intentions.

Adding perceived intentionality as a service failure’s attribution could provide another layer of explanation of customer behavior. Also, an expanded study using a sector characterized by higher cost of change and permanent consumption could provide result’s generalizability.

Brand attachment should be included in the customer service strategy. In a service failure situation, brand attachment becomes part of the “service customer policy” helping customers to regulate their negative emotions.

This study fills the knowledge gap regarding the role of customers’ positive emotions toward brands when a service failure occurs. The current study extends branding literature by differentiating brand attachment role from coping tactics.

This paper aims to explore the impact of an overlooked variable, brand personality, as a basis for brand forgiveness and recovery following brand failures.

Data were collected via three on-line surveys using Amazon Mechanical Turk, including a total of 475 respondents (125, 113 and 237) and using a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial design.

Results show that a brand’s dominant personality (warm vs competent) elicits different expectations regarding brand performance, and that surprisingly, consumers more readily forgive, rather than censure, brand failures which violate their expectations. Further, this effect exists independent of the consumer’s relationship with the brand. These findings occur across different brands (both fictitious and real), manipulations of brand personality and brand failure-type and indices for brand forgiveness. Results indicate the interactive effect of brand personality and failure-type was mediated by brand credibility, while consumers’ desire to re-evaluate the brand served as a moderator.

This research demonstrates that while brand failures are largely considered from a negative perspective, brand personality can serve to bolster consumer perceptions of brands post-failure. Further, and separate from strong consumer-brand relationships, brand personality serves as an important signal for consumer expectations and plays a pivotal role in post-failure forgiveness and behavioral intentions.

This study contributes to the literature by introducing and testing the role brand personality plays, independent of an existing and strong consumer-brand relationship, in consumer response to brand failure. Further, the mediator of and a moderator for this effect are identified.

This paper aims to investigate whether anthropomorphized (i.e. humanized) brands are judged less negatively for competence failures than for moral lapses and how these ethical judgments impact negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) intentions of less-lonely and more-lonely consumers.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted, involving a total of 1,375 US mechanical turk (Amazon consumer panel) participants.

Findings show that brand humanization has an impact on ethical judgments only for less-lonely consumers. More specifically, for less-lonely consumers, a humanizing strategy backfires when the failure is moral but helps the brand when the failure is competence-related. On the other hand, more-lonely consumers judge the situation less negatively overall, and this effect is not impacted by the anthropomorphization strategy. Process tests indicate that these judgments indirectly affect consumers’ intention to spread NWOM following negative events.

Future research could examine the specific process for lonely consumers (i.e. the role of empathy) and manipulate the size of the negative events (i.e. consumer perceptions of moderate vs extreme failures).

Brand managers need to consider their specific situations, as anthropomorphization can have both positive and negative effects depending on the consumers and the failure type (moral vs competence).

Extant research indicates that a humanizing strategy backfires when the market has negative information about the brand. This research introduces types of negative information, as well as consumers’ loneliness as moderators and contributes to the literature in branding, business ethics and word-of-mouth.

Extant literature holds contradictory views about the brand love’s moderation effect in the link between brand failure and consumer’s retaliation. This paper aims to first examine how failure severity correlates with negative emotions and how negative emotions lead to retaliation intention. Then, it probes into opposite moderation effects of brand love in these two stages. Further, it explores contingent factors, including perceived fairness, inferred goodwill, aggressive personality and brand trust, which may moderate “love is blind” effect or “love becomes hate” effect.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among the sample of 293 responses from Thailand, and 239 responses from China. A total of eight hypotheses were tested by adopting hierarchical regression technique and slope analyses.

The results show that consumers facing brand failure suffer negative emotions and then generate retaliation intention. Brand love positively moderates the link between failure severity and negative emotions, which is called “love becomes hate” effect. Meanwhile, brand love negatively moderates the link between negative emotions and retaliation intention, which is called “love is blind” effect. In addition, perceived fairness and inferred goodwill alleviate “love becomes hate” effect, and aggressive personality decreases “love is blind” effect.

This study makes contribution to brand failure literature by revealing twofold moderating roles of brand love in arousing retaliation behavior of consumers who encounter product/service failure, as well as contingent factors of these roles. Also, the research findings provide managerial implications to brand managers as to how to manage brand failure and reduce consumers’ retaliation by manipulating brand love and relevant contingent variables.

This study aims to examine the impact of consumers’ individual differences on their reactions to brand failure.

Three studies (one qualitative, one survey and one experiment) were conducted. Study 1 aimed to understand consumers’ thoughts at the time of brand failure. Studies 2 and 3 investigated the impact of regulatory focus and its interaction with consumers’ attachment style on their reactions to brand failure.

This research establishes that consumers demonstrate different types of behaviors at the time of brand failure. Specifically, those with a promotion focus display less negative (revenge and brand avoidance) and more positive (trust and loyalty) behavior than those with a prevention focus. Furthermore, this research shows an interaction between consumers’ attachment style and regulatory focus. The impact of regulatory focus holds only for secure consumers; for fearful consumers, regulatory focus does not change their behavior.

The study reveals the impact of regulatory focus and attachment styles on consumer behavior at the time of brand failure. Future research might examine the impact of these factors over time, rather than only at the time of the incident.

Marketers should be aware of the impact of attachment style and regulatory focus after a brand failure. This knowledge will enable them to customize their communication tools to trigger their desired condition. This research also emphasizes the role of customer service at the time of crisis.

This research is the first to investigate the impact of regulatory focus and attachment style on consumers’ reactions to brand failure.

The study of shame has a long tradition in intra- and inter-personal psychology. This paper aims to investigate whether consumers can experience brand shame after self-relevant consumption incidents. Specifically, this research proposes that consumers follow a complex shame-inducing process in the aftermath of unpleasant experiences involving their favorite brand. The moderating role of relational tie strength between consumers and their favorite brand existing prior to symbolic failures is examined.

A scenario-based, online survey (n = 660) among consumers who have recently experienced a self-relevant failure with their favorite brand was conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis ensured the reliability and validity of the measurement model. For testing the conceptual model, data was analyzed by means of a moderated mediation analysis. The proposed model was tested against, among others, common method bias and alternative models. The findings were cross-validated with a scenario-based online experiment (n = 1,616).

Results show that brand shame is a key mediator between customer dissatisfaction and brand anger when self-relevant, symbolic failures happen. Moreover, strong consumer-brand identification triggers brand-detrimental effects. It is shown to influence the connection between consumers’ inward- (i.e. brand shame) and resulting outward-directed (i.e. brand anger) negative emotions on brands, which lead to consumer vengeance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to introduce the concept of situational brand shame to the literature on favorite brands. Furthermore, it shows that consumer-brand identification moderates the direct and indirect (via brand shame) unfavorable effects of failure-induced dissatisfaction on brand anger. This research adds insights to the investigation of the “love-becomes-hate” effect arising after self-relevant failures involving consumers’ most preferred brand.

This study aims to examine the role played by brand equity orientation and failure type in service recovery. Specifically, through the lens of forgiveness, the way brand equity orientation and failure type influence consumer response to recovery is revealed.

This research tests a novel model using data collected from 1,589 consumers in two scenario-based experimental studies. The statistical product and service solutions (SPSS) program with the PROCESS tool was used to test the mediation and moderated mediation effects.

The research findings suggest that forgiveness plays a mediation role in the relationship between recovery and satisfaction. Brand equity orientation moderates the mediation effect of forgiveness on the relationship between recovery and recovery satisfaction. In addition, failure type also plays an important role and there is a significant three-way interaction effect (service recovery × brand equity orientation × failure type) on recovery satisfaction under certain circumstances.

Building on the extant literature which focuses on the cognitive process when investigating recovery and consumer reaction, this research advocates the significant role played by the psychological process, namely, the feeling of forgiveness, in explaining the effect of distinct recovery strategies on consumer satisfaction. This research also unveils the effects of brand equity orientation and failure type on recovery outcomes.

When addressing performance failure, brand equity orientation and failure type need to be identified. Businesses could develop recovery strategies to arouse consumer forgiveness, which would lead to increased recovery satisfaction. When designing recovery strategies, managers need to be mindful of the effects of brand equity orientation and failure type.

This research is one of the few which reveals the mediating role played by forgiveness on the effect of recovery. Taking brand equity orientation and failure type into consideration, the findings of this research provide new insights into the recovery literature.

This research aims to investigate the influence of consumers' anticipated trust in service providers on brand switching intention and its underlying psychological mechanism. More importantly, this study explores the moderating role of type of service providers (human staff/humanoid robots/nonhumanoid robots).

This study adopted two single-factor between-subjects experimental designs and tested the hypotheses in two typical service failure scenarios: Study 1, a hotel scenario (N = 403); and Study 2, a restaurant scenario (N = 323).

The results suggest that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between consumers' anticipated trust and tolerance of service failure and that such tolerance has a mediating effect on the relationship between anticipated trust and brand switching intention. Moreover, when service failure is caused by a humanoid service robot, a moderate anticipated trust level of consumers is most conducive to increasing tolerance, which in turn reduces their propensity to switch brands.

This study examines the nature of the relationship between anticipated trust and tolerance in a service failure context, revealing an inverted U-shaped relationship. More importantly, the boundary conditions under which different service provides have an influence on this relationship are incorporated. Finally, this study explores the influence of service failure tolerance on brand switching intentions in a technological context, enriching consumer–brand relationship research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of online service failure on online customer satisfaction and offline customer loyalty, and the moderating role of brand strength is also examined. While extant research on brick and click service mode recognizes the positive spillover effect from offline stores to online stores, this study analyzes the negative spillover effect from online stores to offline stores.

This paper tests the hypotheses by two studies. Study 1 is based on a 2 (failure severity: mild vs severe) × 2 (brand strength: strong vs weak) between-subjects experimental design using scenarios in a brick and click retailer context, while study 2 is based on data collected from a scenario-based questionnaire survey and analyzed through the structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that participants exposed to severe online service failure show lower online satisfaction as compared to their counterparts exposed to mild online service failure, but they show the similar level of offline loyalty in both degrees of online service failure. Nevertheless, these results are not moderated by brand strength significantly.

An experimental design and a scenario-based questionnaire survey are used to test the framework. However, the generalizability of the research findings is still limited to a specific study setting. Future research in a different setting is needed to further validate the presented findings.

The findings suggest that physical service providers should adopt aggressive online expansion strategy to seize the market and pay more attention to online service quality rather than online marketing only.

This is one of few studies to explore the risk of brick and click service mode, and provide a clear understanding of the likely occurrence of online service failure and its impact on online customer satisfaction and offline customer loyalty. It extends prior research by exploring non-existence of negative perceptual effect from online service failure to offline customer loyalty in the short run and weakening brand effect, which contributes to cross-channel spillover effect in the integrated multi-channel context and brand building in the internet era.