Skip to Content

Stanford GSB News

 

Highly Trusted Brands Run More Risk of Offending Customers

March 2003

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—You're trying to catchthe digital photography wave. You've set up a hot-looking website, pickedfeatures and price points the competition can't beat, and you'reattracting lots of customers. Then kaboom! A careless technician hits thewrong key and hundreds of orders of snapshots are deleted. The end result?Some of your customers like your service better than ever.

Not the outcome you expected? Of course not. But a new study byJennifer Aaker, an associate professor of marketing at the StanfordGraduate School of Business, suggests that miscues by a business canactually reinvigorate flagging customer interest and loyalty.

Needless to say, Aaker and colleagues Susan Fournier, associateprofessor of business administration at Harvard Business School and S.Adam Brasel, a doctoral student in marketing at the Stanford GraduateSchool of Business, don't suggest that angering customers is a preferredmarketing strategy. In a recently completed study, however, they did findthat brand personality has a significant impact on customer relationshipsand the ability of a brand to recover from mistakes. "Marketers seemto have thought personalities of their brands were something flavorful toadd to their advertising. But now we have evidence that brandpersonalities can affect the very existence and strength of the consumerrelationship. It is a powerful tool that is underleveraged and poorlyunderstood," they argue. And like human personality traits, brandpersonality traits "once conceived as unidimensional and static are,in fact, multi-dimensional and quite active."

Intel, for example, projects a fun, fresh, energetic personality withits "Intel Inside" consumer campaigns that make a once invisibleingredient seem like the most exciting part of the PC. But the chipmakerhas another personality when marketing to business users. It's competent,with the emphasis on technological innovation and overall reliability."Brands, their personality associations and the ensuing relationshipto customers need to be nurtured, understood, and managed," saysAaker.

Is Your Brand Hot?
"When Good Brands Do Bad," a paper by the three researchers, isthe result of a two-month field experiment exploring the relationshipsthat formed between consumers and an online photographic service brand.Aaker and colleagues studied the effects of "transgressions,"that is lapses in service or violations of trust by brands with differentpersonalities — one "sincere," the other"exciting."

Sincere brands, the authors explain, dominate the world of classicbrands such as Hallmark, Ford, and Coca-Cola. "Traits of nurturance,family-orientation, and traditionalism, which have been positively relatedto relationship strength and satisfaction are characteristic of sincerepersonalities. In addition, trustworthiness, which can temper feelings ofvulnerability and strengthen a relationship, is a product of"sincerity," they argue.

"Exciting brands," the paper states, "are built aroundqualities of energy and youthfulness. Exciting brands such as YAHOO!,Virgin, and MTV, attempt to differentiate through unique and irreverentadvertising, cool brand logos, atypical brand names, and hiplanguage."

Some earlier studies suggest that although exciting brands can beattractive and attention getting, they may be seen as less legitimate andtherefore unable to garner consumer trust. The truth of that assumptionwas one of the most significant questions the researchers set out toanswer.

Participants for the study were recruited under the guise ofinvolvement in a beta test of a new online photographic film processingand digitizing company named Captura Photography Services. The cover storyhelped justify the high level of interaction and monitoring the experimentrequired.

Two personalities were created for Captura — one sincere, theother exciting. Each had its own website and email messages, designed bywebsite professionals and copywriters to reflect that brand's personality.

Ultimately, the 48 beta-test participants were told that they wouldinteract the branded service one to three times each week over two months.Each participant was sent disposable cameras and then used then returnedto Captura for development and posting in an online photo album. Theyreceived emails instructing them to interact with Captura in various ways,such as visiting the website to read magazine-like articles outlininginnovative uses for disposable cameras or to get news about photographycontests. This allowed the customers to get to know all aspects ofCaptura's site and service offerings. None of the participants knew therewere actually two Captura sites, of course.

Factors such as color (soft browns, oranges and yellows versus vividreds, purples and greens), vocabulary, and content determined personality.While a message from the sincere brand would start with "Hello,"a message from the exciting brand would begin, "Hey!" Similarly,content as contained in postings-family picnics versus rock climbing onthe "Stories" page — and page links to Disney and Kodakinstead of MTV and Spin — conveyed the personality. Theparticipants filled out questionnaires exploring their reactions to theservice three times over the two-month test period.

After seven interactions with Captura, half of the participants in eachgroup were told that an employee had accidentally erased their onlinephotos (although their actual photos were still intact). At the same time,the other half was reminded that their NetAlbum was available online.

Two days later, apologies were sent out to those who were let down, andparticipants were told that the online photo album had been restored.

How could you do that to me?
When the questionnaires were tallied and analyzed a few points wereclear:

  • The sincere brand enjoyed stronger relationships than the excitingbrand-until the photos were lost. The transgression did remarkabledamage to the sincere brand.
  • Moreover, the sincere brand did not show significant signs ofrecovery despite apologies and attempts to make amends.
  • When there was no transgression, the relationships between theparticipants and the exciting brand deteriorated.
  • However, when the transgression and recovery occurred, therelationship with the exciting brand took an upturn on many measures.The relationship became more permanent in the participants' mind. And,the event allowed trust, accountability, and responsibility to beestablished for the first time.

In this sense, the transgression operated as a means of reinvigoratingthe exciting brand relationship.

Interestingly, the researchers conclude that, "these findingssuggest that putting trustworthiness forth as a fundamental andoverarching imperative warrants re-consideration."

"Trust," Aaker said in an interview, "is much heraldedin marketing, but it has a downside. When trust is violated —  asit often is in long-standing relationships — particularly thoseestablished with a sincere, warm, and honest partner — it can bedevastating. In concrete ways, this data shows a dark side of blindpursuit of partner quality and trust. What needs to be understood andmanaged are the contracts, norms and rules that underlie the relationshipbetween a consumer and brand, and how a brand's actions fit or violatewith those norms."

What to do with this knowledge? "Be aware of the type of brandpartner you are, the type of relationship you are helping to create, andthe expectations that are being set in the consumer's mind," arguesAaker. "Also, know that brands will screw up. Indeed, that is theonly relationship given of which we can be sure. The question is what willthat breech do to the relationship — how will it cause consumers toredefine their contracts to the brand? Will they realign with moreintimacy, or redefine the contract toward greater distancing?"

There are no silver bullets. However, this research does show that iftrust is broken, you have to move quickly, wisely, and strategically torepair it.

—by Bill Snyder

Related Information

When Good Brands Do Bad, by Jennifer Aaker, Susan Fournier andS. Adam Brasel, forthcoming 2004 in Journal of Consumer Research

Williams, Patti and Aaker, Jennifer (2002), Can Mixed EmotionsPeacefully Co-Exist? Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (March),636-649

Jennifer Aaker, Veronica Benet-Martínez and Jordi Garolera (2001), ConsumptionSymbols as Carriers of Culture: A Study of Japanese and Spanish BrandPersonality Constructs, Journal of Personality & SocialPsychology, 81 (3), 492-508

Aaker, Jennifer (2000), Accessibility or Diagnosticity?Disentangling the Influence of Culture on Persuasion Processes andAttitudes, Journal of Consumer Research, 26 (March), 340-357

Aaker, Jennifer (1997), Dimensions of Brand Personality, Journalof Marketing Research, 34 (August), 347-357. Reprinted in a book ofreadings, in Decisions Marketing, April 1999, and in Journal ofBrand Management, June 2001