Sorry but no sorry: The use and effects of apologies in airline webcare responses to NeWOM messages of flight passengers
van Hooijdonk,Charlotte Liebrecht,C.
van Hooijdonk,Charlotte
Liebrecht,C.
Abstract
Offering an apology is a strategy brands use in response to negative electronic word of mouth. However, its effectiveness is equivocal and may depend on its combination with other strategies. In this paper, the use and the effectiveness of offering an apology in webcare conversations between airlines and complaining customers on Twitter is investigated. In Study 1, a corpus study was conducted to examine whether and how apologies occurred in 480 webcare conversations. Offering an apology was the most frequently used response strategy. Moreover, accommodative strategies were more frequent than defensive strategies. In Study 2, we investigated the effectiveness of apologies separately and combined with a defensive and/or accommodative strategy. The experiment had a 2 (apology: present vs. absent) × 2 (defensive strategy: present vs. absent) × 2 (accommodative strategy: present vs. absent) between-subjects design. Flight passengers (N = 151) assessed a webcare response to a service failure on the airline’s reputation. Although the presence of an apology did not enhance brand reputation, a combination of both a defensive and accommodative strategy did. We conclude that airlines prefer an apology as response to online complaints, but the combination of defensive and accommodative strategies truly protects their reputation.
Description
Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Master's students Communication and Information Sciences of our universities for collecting the corpus, and cabin attendant Myrte Jansen (MA) for collecting the experimental data during the flights with the international airline. The authors also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier draft of the manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Date
2021-04
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Research Projects
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Keywords
Apologies, Brand reputation, CRISIS, NeWOM, RESPONSIBILITY, Response strategies, STRATEGIES, Webcare
Citation
van Hooijdonk, C & Liebrecht, C 2021, 'Sorry but no sorry : The use and effects of apologies in airline webcare responses to NeWOM messages of flight passengers', Discourse, Context & Media, vol. 40, 100442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100442