Developing a Conceptual Model for the Relationship Between Social Media Behavior, Negative Consumer Emotions and Brand D
Companies have been facing the dark side of social media. Particularly, the odds of customer complaints and brand insults have increased tremendously. Social media has given a voice to disappointed consumers. They use the voice when they feel negative emo
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Turku University of Applied Sciences, Turku, Finland [email protected] Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland
Abstract. Companies have been facing the dark side of social media. Partic‐ ularly, the odds of customer complaints and brand insults have increased tremendously. Social media has given a voice to disappointed consumers. They use the voice when they feel negative emotions, for example, due to product failures, service problems or unethical behavior. It seems reasonable to expect that the more ubiquitous social media becomes, the more it persuades people to share also their negative experiences. However, although social media raises new challenges for companies, it also gives them new opportunities. Social media enables companies to trace disappointed customers, evaluate their impressiveness and communicate with them. The conceptual paper aims to develop a model for the relationship between social media behavior, negative consumer emotions and brand disloyalty. The argu‐ ment of this paper is that although social media gives consumers more power which is manifested in sharing negative emotions related to the company, the effect this has on brand disloyalty depends on the company’s behavior. Keywords: Social media · Negative emotions · Brand disloyalty
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Introduction
A great deal of social media content is emotionally loaded. People express the highs and lows of their everyday life, establish new friendships and break up old ones, share holiday and party pictures, praise and complain about brands, idolize the achievements of their descendants and pets through different social media sites – behavior which is strongly affected by emotion. Emotions can be expressed through words, pictures, emoticons and videos. Social media has transformed the ways companies and customers interact. Meta‐ phorically, social media has punctured holes into companies’ walls and made them transparent in an unforeseen way. Social media has intensified the development in which the competition is based more on brands’ ability to inspire emotional experiences, than on technical details of products. Consequently, companies are nowadays obliged to encounter their customers and other stakeholders more openly. Many companies have © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved Y.K. Dwivedi et al. (Eds.): I3E 2016, LNCS 9844, pp. 134–145, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45234-0_13
Developing a Conceptual Model
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witnessed that social media has given customers a powerful medium to voice their negative emotions related, for example, to product failures, service problems or uneth‐ ical behavior. For some companies, social media provides new opportunities, whereas many others just face problems. Presumably, the distinction lies in whether or not the company is able to trace disappointed customers, evaluate their impressiveness and communicate with them. Be it fair or not, social media forces companies to deal with em
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