The Effect Of Corporate Apologies On Consumer Forgiveness: The Moderating Role Of Consumers’ Implicit Theories About Personality

As an effective crisis communication strategy, corporate apologies have become a common practice for corporates to seek consumer forgiveness after brand scandals. However, empirical evidence for the link between corporate apologies and consumer forgiveness is weak and inconsisitent. Some consumers are quick to forgive, whereas others just turn a deaf ear to corporate apologies. The aim of this thesis is to explore how to improve the effectiveness of corporate apology from the perspective of consumers’ personal traits in order to help the scandalized brand recover from the crisis more quickly. Therefore, this article based on literature on implicit theories of personality in social psychology, proposes that the implicit theories that consumers hold(whether they believe personal attributes are malleable or fixed) is a key moderator of the link between corporate apologies and consumer forgiveness. What’s more, this article also explores one potential mechanism that underlies why some consumers are easy to forgive the scandalized brand but some are not.In two studies we tested the propositon that the apology-forgiveness link is moderated by consumers’ implicit theories(measured in Study 1 and manipulated in Study 2, respectively) across different brand transgressions(a fictitious brand of beverage, Water World in Study 1 and a fictitious clothing brand, Style in Study 2). The result of Study 1(N=122) reveals that the implicit theories of consumers did moderate the link between corporate apologies and consumer forgivness. Specifically, consumers who believe in personality malleability(i.e., incremental theoriests) are more likely to forgive the scandalized brand in the presence of a corporate apology than no corporate apology. However, consumers who believe in personality stability(ie., entity theories) are not affected by the corporate apology(vs. no corporate apology). Besides, low levels of consumer forgiveness was oberved among both incremental and entity theorists in the no corporate apology condition, which means incremental theorists are not simply more forgiveing of brand transgressions. Only when the scandalized brand offer an apology and express truly sorry, incremental theorists will forgive the scandalized brand. Study 2(N=120) not only replicated the result of Study 1. And more importantly, it demonstrated one mechanism by which a corporate apology yields consumer forgiveness among incremental theorists but not among entity thorists: expectancies about repeating a transgression.Finally, the contributions of this paper to apology effectiveness literature and implicit theories of personality are discussed. What’s more, we also discussed the managerial implications of this paper. According to the findings of this paper, corporates should apologize timely when they made some mistakes. Corporates also can try to induce consumers’ incremental beliefs by using brand advertising, background music and so on. Fudamentally, corporates need to cultivate a kind of growth mindset which means corporates should really learn from mistakes and make a change in order to reduce consumers’ expectancies about repeating a transgression.