Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

the disparaging effects of service failures. This contradictory finding suggests that the effect of brand reputation oncustomers‘ response to service failures warrants further exploration. We draw on key aspects of two theories –expectancy disconfirmation theory and judgment assimilation theory in understanding the role of brand reputation incustomer evaluation of service failure. According to expectation disconfirmation theory (Oliver, 1997), customerspatronizing a highly reputed brand have higher expectation in terms of quality of the service provided because of theenhanced attitudes, beliefs and perceptions. On experiencing a service failure in these high reputation brands, thedisconfirmation between the perceived performance and expected performance would be higher compared to anaveragely reputed brand. Thus, customers experience greater loss in case of service failure of the high repute brandscompared to the average repute brands. Following this, we propose that the different coping strategies employed toreduce stress depends on the reputation of the service brand and failure severity. Customers‘ perception of the firmreputation alters customers‘ responses to service failure in terms of employing the coping strategies. Thus wepostulate that for high severe failures, customers experience greater disconfirmation and use coping strategies thatare focused on solving the problem such as action coping and seeking social support for instrumental reasons. Thesecoping strategies would also be used for less severe failures when the company reputation is high as disconfirmationexperienced would be greater for the highly reputed companies than averagely reputed companies. Similarly, copingstrategies directed towards emotions such as rational thinking, positive thinking, emotional venting, seeking socialsupport for emotional reasons, avoidance and denial, although are used more by customers in less severe failurecondition, are also used in high severe failure condition when brand reputation interacts with the severity of thefailure. However, in high severe condition they are less likely to be used by customers of high reputation companythan average reputation company.Hence we hypothesize:Hypothesis H 2a : Severity and brand reputation has a significant interaction effect such that for less severefailure condition, action coping would be more pronounced for high reputation company than averagereputation company.