Davvetas, V. orcid.org/0000-0002-8905-7390, Ulqinaku, A. and Katsikeas, K.S. (2024) Brand transgressions: How, when, and why home country bias backfires. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 52. pp. 976-997. ISSN 0092-0703
Abstract
Despite heightened interest in brand transgressions among academics and practitioners, the literature remains silent about the influence of a brand’s origin on consumer responses to brand misconduct. This leaves managers unaware of how to adapt post-transgression recovery strategies at home and abroad. Contrary to the in-group country bias literature, we theorize an “origin-backfire” effect: consumers forgive domestic brand transgressions less. Analyzing experimental, social media, and secondary-longitudinal data, we find that consumers treat domestic brand transgressors as home-country traitors deserving punishment. Social identity threats mediate this effect and consumer ethnocentrism attenuates it. Transgressions’ damage on brand reputation and value is larger and takes longer to recover from in domestic markets. Managers can alleviate post-transgression backlash through communication framing that construes the transgression as a response to intergroup threats (in foreign markets) and through collective compensation strategies (in domestic markets). The findings reveal cross-national variability in transgressions’ experience, impact, and recovery and inform post-transgression repair strategies.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Brand transgressions, Domestic/foreign brands, Social identity threat, Brand forgiveness, Domestic country bias |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Marketing Division (LUBS) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 14 Mar 2024 11:20 |
Last Modified: | 04 Oct 2024 10:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11747-024-01018-9 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:210236 |