Consumer cynicism in service failures

Abstract

Despite growing corporate commitments to being customer-centric, many customers perceive firms as self-driven and caring only about their own business interests. This sentiment is projected in consumer cynicism, or negative consumer attitudes based on the disbelief in the sincerity of firms' motives and actions. We argue that consumer cynicism emerges in response to negative marketplace situations, such as service and product failures. Across four scenario-based experiments and one video-based experiment, our research examines cynicism as a key mediator, transmitting the effect of double deviation (i.e., a failure in delivery and in subsequent recovery) on negative electronic word-ofmouth and repurchase intention. We further demonstrate that consumer cynicism can be minimized when the provider uses cocreated recovery (i.e., engages consumers in recovery) even if the recovery fails and when the provider offers a strong empathetic apology (either before or after recovery failure). Our research contributes to consumer and service recovery research by highlighting an important but overlooked role of consumer cynicism in the context of double deviation. We also offer managerial insights into cocreation and empathetic apologies as cost-effective recovery strategies to minimize cynicism.

Consumer cynicism: Interdisciplinary hybrid review and research agenda

“…For example, Helm (2004) has utilized a grounded theory approach using in-depth interviews to As seen in our bibliometric review, the advanced field of organizational cynicism gives way to the nascent area (Helm, 2004) of consumer cynicism research. We advance the core construct by proposing an integrated model of consumer cynicism based on the existing findings in the organizational (Andersson, 1996;Andersson & Bateman, 1997;Chiaburu et al, 2013;Dean Jr et al, 1998;Reichers et al, 1997;Stanley et al, 2005) and consumer (Balaji et al, 2018;Chylinski & Chu, 2010;Helm, 2004;Helm et al, 2015;Indibara & Varshney, 2020;Ketron, 2016;Odou & De Pechpeyrou, 2011;Tran et al, 2022) cynicism research.…”

How Cynicism Mediates Spiritual Leadership and Organizational Commitment? (The case of Turkish and Indonesian Universities)

“…Numerous studies on the concept of cynicism can be found in the literature, which examine it as a conceptual, dependent, or independent variable. For example, Durmuş (2022), Kaya et al (2022), Mills and Keil (2005), Andersson andBateman (1997), andTran et al (2022) have conducted research on cynicism. Some studies also explore the mediating role of cynicism in the relationship between different concepts, such as Fayganoğlu (2021), Yıldırım and Ceyhan (2020), Genç (2018), Çoban and Deniz (2021), Ajawarneh and Atan (2018), and Ogunfowora et al (2018).…”

The Role of Word-of-Mouth Communication in the Formation of Cynical Attitudes Towards Private Health Care Organizations

“…Word-of-mouth communication is considered the consequent, or, in other words, the result of consumer cynicism (Tran et al, 2022). Thus, it is stated that consumers who develop a cynical attitude towards businesses and their activities tends to share this attitude with negative rhetoric.…”