Negative brand events can significantly harm the brand, affecting consumer cognitions, emotions, and behavior, leading to negative brand evaluations, negative emotions, brand avoidance, and retaliation. Thus, it is critical for brands to design and implement strategies that promote consumer forgiveness to mitigate those negative consumer responses. Despite the growing literature on the determinant factors of consumer behavior in a brand failure context, there is still scarce evidence regarding the impact of brand type on consumer responses, including consumer forgiveness, following a negative brand event. Considering that consumers tend to react differently to a brand perceived as arrogant (making them feel inferior), as opposed to a brand they strongly identify with, this paper focuses on failures of equal vs. higher status brands and investigates their impact on consumer forgiveness. Following the above, we expect that differences in brand status can shape consumer behavior following a failure or transgression.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that incidents like the recall of the exploding Samsung Galaxy 7 phones drive owners of other (competing) brands to experience and express feelings of joy when a rival brand fails (e.g., “the hottest phone in the streets!”). Although consumers sometimes experience brand-related schadenfreude—that is, joy out of other brand’s failure—, psychological processes driving schadenfreude are not clearly understood (Hickman & Ward, 2007; Van Dijk, Van Koningsbruggen, Ouwerkerk, & Wesseling, 2011). We propose that schadenfreude may be elicited by consumers’ tendencies to stand by their choices (Ye & Gawronski, 2016). We demonstrate that consumers show higher levels of schadenfreude if their choice is disconfirmed; for example, by a comparative product review that evaluates their chosen brand to be inferior to a rival non-chosen brand. Furthermore, this effect is moderated by the popularity of the chosen brand and mediated by feelings of self-threat. Moreover, we show that this effect is stronger for narcissists. We also find evidence that schadenfreude is a means for consumers to reaffirm their sense of self after they experience a self-threat induced by the disconfirmation of their choice.

As blogs continue to grow in importance, they have quickly become one of the largest and most established forms of non-traditional media (Onishi and Manchanda, 2012; Stephen and Galak, 2012). Due to this popularity, brands are striving to connect to consumers through the blogosphere. One of the most popular approaches is incentivization, whereby the brand incentivizes the blogger to write a review of a given product (Uribe, Buzeta and Velásquez, 2016; Hwang and Jeong, 2016). However, incentivization may pose significant risks for bloggers, who are perceived to be independent from corporate interests and a credible source of information. We employed three experimental studies to show that intrinsic, as compared to extrinsic, incentivization acceptance motives mitigate the negative effect of positive incentivized reviews on perceived independence, credibility and ultimately, blog loyalty. In our final experiment, we find that that followers who are attached to a blog are more likely to continue to browse, revisit and recommend the blog, regardless of incentivization acceptance motives.

Support from the private sector, for example by firms, has been solicited to ease tourist attraction financial constraints and to help their restoration and maintenance out of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities (United Nations, 2010; Europanostra, 2013). When engaging in these partnerships, firms may display different level of altruistic motivation. For example, the Italian fashion company Tod’s demonstrated high altruism by agreeing to restore the Colosseum without any economic or financial return. American Express, however, sought promotional rights when the firm agreed to contribute to the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. Finally, the ticketing agency Eventim renamed the Hammersmith Apollo (now Eventim Apollo) in London following their involvement in the restoration, thus pursuing more strategic, rather than altruistic goals. Non-altruistic goals and the fear that the involvement of a company may generate scepticism in visitors, as they could perceive the authentic image of a tourist attraction to be jeopardized. Managers of tourist attractions are faced with a dilemma: should they seek financial support from third parties (e.g. firms), or would this compromise the appeal of the site, leading to a drop in the number of visitors? In order to address this problem, we conducted two experiments to examine how firms' involvement in restorations affects tourist attractions. We found that firms' altruistic motivations (that denotes the support of a cause without demanding anything in return) are positively associated with tourists' intentions to visit the attraction (Study 1). Moreover, we found that this relationship is mediated by visitors’ perceived authenticity, in other words the belief that the real aspect of the site has not been irreversibly altered. We confirm the robustness of our findings in Study 2, additionally showing how this effect is stronger in the case of heritage sites compared to non-heritage sites. To the best of our knowledge, our results are among the first to show how a lack of altruism in CSR activities can negatively affect the target of the campaign (in this particular case a tourist attraction). Results also suggest managers of tourist attractions with high heritage value to assess the altruistic motives of the firm carefully before engaging in a financial partnership.