Can self-referencing exacerbate punishing behavior toward corporate brand transgressors?
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Can self‑referencing exacerbate punishing behavior toward corporate brand transgressors? Didem Gamze Isiksal1 · Elif Karaosmanoglu1 Revised: 5 February 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This article investigates consumer reactions (punishing behavior) regarding corporate brands that engage in various types of transgressions (mild vs. severe) through a scenario-based experiment. The study adopts a 2 × 2 factorial design that examines the moderating role of self-referencing on the relationship between brand transgression severity and the punishing behavior of consumers. Before conducting the main study, the researchers carried out a pilot study to acquire insights about the severity levels of various brand transgressions as well as to determine the likelihood of individuals encountering them. The main study confirms that there is an interaction effect between self-referencing and transgression severity on consumer punishing behavior. More notably, this research highlights the fact that in cases of mild transgressions, having a point of self-reference in the transgression prompts individuals to punish the transgressor more harshly than in cases of severe transgressions. This finding may serve as a warning for corporate brands, demonstrating that they need to be careful about mild transgressions because even when they represent violations of minor rules, they can have deleterious effects on consumer–brand relationships. Keywords Corporate brand · Transgression · Self-reference · Self-relevance · Punishing behavior
Introduction What happens if brands violate ethical rules to which an individual is sensitive or are directly related to his/her previous experiences? Would a consumer react in the same way to the ethical violations of firms if they do not have a direct bearing on his/her life? Normatively, if we contend that all human beings are rational and optimal decision makers, the answer should be “yes.” However, the paradigm of self-referencing in cognitive psychology suggests that individuals tend to encode incoming information by relating it to previous personal experiences (Burnkrant and Unnava 1995). In other words, self-referencing facilitates the recollection of relevant experiences, which in turn leads to different reinterpretations of new information (Escalas 2007). Accordingly, we could expect that when a corporate brand engages in a transgression, individuals might mentally elaborate on * Didem Gamze Isiksal [email protected] 1
Management Engineering Department, Faculty of Management, Istanbul Technical University, Suleyman Seba cd. No. 2 Macka‑Besiktas, 34367 Istanbul, Turkey
the case based on its valence in their memories of personal experiences. Kesebir and Oishi (2010), for instance, claim that if a friend’s birthday is close to the date of our own, we are more likely to remember it than birthdays that are temporally more distant. Similarly, when a brand commits a transgression, individuals who had similar experiences in the past will be more likely to take note of
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