 Negative word of mouth for a failed innovation from higher/lower equity brands: Moderating roles of opinion leadership and consumer testimonialsM. Deniz Dalman, Subimal Chatterjee and Junhong Min Journal of Business Research, 2020, vol. 115, issue C, 1-13 Abstract: We investigate how higher versus lower-equity brands attract negative word of mouth (NWOM) from consumers when they fail in the marketplace. We find that the dynamics are conditional on the focal consumers’ desire for opinion leadership (OL) and the presence/absence of supporting testimonials for the focal brand. For example, among higher-OL consumers, higher-equity brands attract more (less) NWOM than lower-equity brands in the absence (presence) of testimonials. We show that the pattern emerges, in part, because these consumers wish to stand apart from others and be correct in their assessments when they spread NWOM, and such opportunities present themselves best when higher-equity brands, without supporting testimonials, fail in the marketplace. We discuss how the results can help brand managers insulate their brands from consumer backlash in the event of brand failures. Keywords: Opinion leaders; Word-of-mouth; Branding; Consumer testimonials (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:115:y:2020:i:c:p:1-13 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.04.041 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.