Complaints are different when customers think a company cares

By Vivek Astvansh, Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics, McGill University
Anshu Suri, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University College Dublin
Hoorsana Damavandi, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Tennessee

When a consumer has a bad experience involving a company’s products – be it purchasing a car with a safety defect, becoming the victim of a data breach or having baggage lost by an airline – you might think he or she wouldn’t care too much about the business’s good intentions.

But the opposite appears to be true. When deciding whether to report a negative incident, customers seem to be more influenced by whether they think the company is friendly, sincere and well-intended – a quality that marketing academics and practitioners call “brand warmth” – than by whether they think the company…

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