In my last blog, I used a recent experience I had at Starbucks to illustrate how an unpleasant episode (a brand ‘transgression’) with a potential for negative word-of-mouth can be turned into positive word-of-mouth. I argued that it can be done by responding beyond the expected reparations for an unpleasant customer experience, while ideally also lowering the threshold of what constitutes a bad experience.

However, the likelihood of recommendations also depends on the quality of the emotional connection between the customer and the brand in the first place. This relationship flavours expectations and customer’s reactions to experiences. An appropriate comparison to WOM might be a tiramisu (the Italian dessert—I had one recently, hence the unlikely connection…). The customer-brand relationship is represented by the liquor-soaked biscuit base. It’s yummy. It can even be intoxicating. Tiramisu wouldn’t be tiramisu without this base. The rest of the dessert is merely “built” on top of it.

Enough of the pudding metaphors. What I am trying to say is that advertising and PR are important means of building relationships with consumers. We all know that, of course. But it’s about more than just good or bad relationships, it’s about the right relationship. My favourite study on brand relationship is one that was conducted at Stanford University and published three years ago in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In a nutshell, the experiment had participants sign up for a mock online service (online photography services, to be precise). One group of people were randomly assigned to be customers of a ‘sincere brand’ (manifested in the way the brand was presented, including the Web site, content and style of communication with customers, etc.). The other group was assigned to the ‘exciting’ brand. After signing up, people’s attitudes towards the brand were measured. Then the actual ‘experimental manipulation’ followed. It consisted of having participants believe that their online photo album had been accidentally deleted. After the incident, customers received an apology from customer services and a restoration of service. Customer attitudes were measured before the incident and then again before and after the apology.

As we would expect, results of the study show quite different outcomes for the exciting and sincere brands. Based on a measure that the researchers call ‘self-connection’ (the amount of connection felt between oneself as a person and the brand), the sincere brand could not recover from the incident. Not so for the exciting brand. In fact, after receiving an apology, customers of that brand had even higher levels of self-connection to the brand than before the transgression!
(In an experimental condition in which no transgression occurred, however, self-connection levels increased over time for the sincere brand, but decreased for the exciting brand.)

I believe that this experiment is a powerful illustration of how potentially negative WOM can be turned into something positive. In the case of the experimental example, had the customer service response gone beyond an apology and service restoration, it is likely that not just attitudes but recommendations would have been boosted.

Do you have any examples of a negative experience being turned into a recommendation?

Posted by Alain on June 13, 2007

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