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

on varied levels of failure severity and brand reputation. This would help them come up with better recoverystrategies that would cater to larger segments of customers.Second, the study proposed that in case of high severe failures, strategies such as positive thinking and rationalthinking are used less when the company is highly reputed. This indicates that customers would not justify thefailure with any rationale nor would they try to look at the brighter side of this experience. These customers wouldprefer to make an effort to reduce the source of their stress by taking appropriate actions which might includeswitching the company or indulging in negative word of mouth. Thus it would be very difficult for managers toidentify these customers who would silently exit from the relationship. This kind of behaviour would further result incustomer turnover, revenue loss and goodwill loss for the failing firm. This suggests that marketing managers mustcarefully design recovery strategies to restore the trust among the customers experiencing high severity failures andprevent them from discontinuing the relationship.Finally, of the main finding of this study is the impact of failure severity on the companies with average reputation.Very interestingly, the results demonstrated that high severe problems not only provoke customers of highly reputedcompanies to indulge in active coping strategies but it induces the customer of averagely reputed company to agreater extent. Thus the results of this study confirm that irrespective of high or average reputation, marketingmanagers should be extra cautious while dealing with high severe failures. However, this does not mean thatcustomers facing high severe problems do not resort to other coping strategies. They do engage in emotion-basedstrategies such as rational thinking and positive thinking but to a lesser extent when compared to less severeproblems.An interesting finding of the study suggests that customers facing less severe failure are more prone towards ventingout their anger when the service provider is of high reputation. These customers have higher propensity to let theirfeelings out since they are high on emotions resulting in greater negative word of mouth. Thus highly reputed brandsshould be very careful about recovering the minor problems which can potentially be detrimental in terms of spoilingtheir goodwill. This warrants managers of the highly reputed companies to identify and take care of these customerswho are more prone to express their emotional state even if the magnitude of the failure is less.LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH