When Customer Love Turns into Lasting Hate: The Effects of Relationship Strength and Time on Customer Revenge and Avoidance

By Yany Grégoire, T. M. Tripp, Renaud Legoux. Journal of Marketing, 2009

962 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article explores the effects of time and relationship strength on the evolution of customer revenge and avoidance in online public complaining contexts. First, the authors examine whether online complainers hold a grudge—in terms of revenge and avoidance desires—over time. They find that time affects the two desires differently: Although revenge decreases over time, avoidance increases over time, indicating that customers indeed hold a grudge. Second, the authors examine the moderation effect of a strong relationship on how customers hold this grudge. They find that firms' best customers have the longest unfavorable reactions (i.e., a longitudinal love-becomes-hate effect). Specifically, over time, the revenge of strong-relationship customers decreases more slowly and their avoidance increases more rapidly than that of weak-relationship customers. Third, the authors explore a solution to attenuate this damaging effect—namely, the firm offering an apology and compensation after the online complaint. Overall, they find that strong-relationship customers are more amenable to any level of recovery attempt. The authors test the first two issues with a longitudinal survey and the third issue with a follow-up experiment.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d027986ea2aff9850675e9b737753500b17a55b4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Positive and negative behaviours resulting from brand attachment: The moderating effects of attachment styles (2018, background): “When consumers realise that their trust has been abused by brands, they are inclined to retaliate (Grégoire et al., 2009).”
The Effects of Harm Directions and Service Recovery Strategies on Customer Forgiveness and Negative Word-of-Mouth Intentions (2015, methodology): “…within direct-harm and indirect-harm service failure, this research contributes to the service literature by presenting service recovery as a viable strategy for a service provider to employ in order to encourage customers to “forgive after service failure episodes” (Grégoire et al., 2009, p.29)”
Gray Shades of Green: Causes and Consequences of Green Skepticism (2017, methodology): “We measured negative WOM with three items derived from Grégoire et al. (2009).”
Moral disengagement of hotel guest negative WOM: moral identity centrality, moral awareness, and anger. (2014, methodology): “We referred to Gelbrich (2010) and Grégoire et al. (2009) for the wording of vindictive vs. support-seeking negative WOM.”
Exploring consumer conflict management in service encounters (2010, methodology): “Research identifies that consumers respond to conflict with service providers in different ways (Bonifield and Cole 2007; Grégoire et al. 2009; Schneider and Bowen 1999; Zourrig et al. 2009).”
Transformational Relationship Events (2015, background): “…effect of a negative product disconfirmation (e.g., service failure) on customer responses (consistent with buffering; Hess, Ganesan, and Klein 2003) but aggravate the effect of a negative relational disconfirmation (i.e., the “love becomes hate” effect; Gregoire, Tripp, and Legoux 2009, p. 19).”