Countering Virtual Brand Sabotage: The Power of Informative Responses

Many disgruntled consumers who experience service failures turn to brand sabotage, by posting vindictive posts on social media platforms. Such aggressive revenge behavior has the goal of influencing others and causing harm to a firm. Vindictive posts require a response from the firm, to limit their potential negative influence on other consumers who read the posts. Three large-scale field studies and five lab experiments, including an incentive-compatible study, demonstrate that firm responses to such sabotage should focus on information (rather than empathy) because informative responses help reduce readers’ risk perceptions, prompting them to exhibit more positive behaviors toward the firm. Service guarantees can mitigate the impact of these responses. Importantly, the type of firm response only matters if the post is vindictive. For non-vindictive posts both informative and empathic firm responses working equally well. Our findings help firms to detect vindictive posts, suggest appropriate response strategies, and reveal how the risk perceptions evoked by vindictive posts can be mitigated.