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A systematic review of brand transgression, service failure recovery and product-harm crisis: integration and guiding insights

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Abstract

Research studies on brand transgression (BT), service failure and recovery (SFR), and product-harm crisis (PHC) appear to have a common focus, yet the three streams developed surprisingly independently and with limited reference to one another. This situation is unfortunate because all three fields study a similar phenomenon by using complementary conceptualizations, theories, and methods; we argue that this development in silos represents an unnecessary obstacle to the development of a common discipline. In response, this review synthesizes the growing BT, SFR, and PHC literatures by systematically reviewing 236 articles across 21 years using an integrative conceptual framework. In doing so, we showcase how the mature field of SFR in concert with the younger but prolific BT and PHC fields can enrich one another while jointly advancing a broad and unified discipline of negative events in marketing. Through this process, we provide and explicate seven overarching insights across three major themes (theory, dynamic aspects, and method) to encourage researchers to contribute to the interface between these three important fields. The review concludes with academic contributions and practical implications.

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Notes

  1. For brevity, SFR means “the service failure and recovery field,” BT stands for “the brand transgression field,” and PHC represents “the product-harm crisis field.”

  2. We estimated the number of SFR articles or reviews by using the Web of Science database. From our query, we found 1,154 articles on the topics of “service failure or service recovery” between 1998 and 2018, including only the categories “management” and “business” (as of December 2018).

  3. Please note that the final responses or dependent variables are discussed in our last insight.

  4. See Wan et al. (2011) and Harmeling et al. (2015) for notable exceptions.

  5. The notion of customer journey has recently been utilized to understand the recovery stage (Van Vaerenbergh et al. 2019). We apply a similar logic in this section, but by referring to a broader focal event (i.e., a “negative event episode” instead of the recovery stage) and larger scale pre-event and post-event phases.

  6. The total of the types of PHC informants exceeds 100% since some studies include data from 1+ sources.

  7. As illustrated in Figure 2, PHC can be divided in two sub-streams: its “micro-meso”-focused component (e.g., Dawar and Pillutla 2000) and its “macro”-focused component (Cleeren et al. 2013; Gao et al. 2015). For simplicity of exposition, we refer to the first component as “behavioral PHC” and the second as “quantitative PHC.”

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Funding

Funding from NTU’s Start-Up Grant (M4082275.010) awarded to Mansur Khamitov and the Chair Omer DeSerres in Retailing to Yany Grégoire is gratefully acknowledged

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Ave, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Mansur Khamitov

  2. HEC Montréal, 3000 Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montréal, QC, H3T 2A7, Canada

    Yany Grégoire & Anshu Suri

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  1. Mansur Khamitov
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  2. Yany Grégoire
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  3. Anshu Suri
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Correspondence to Mansur Khamitov or Yany Grégoire.

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Mansur Khamitov and Yany Grégoire equally share the lead on this article. John Hulland and Mark Houston served as special issue editors.

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Khamitov, M., Grégoire, Y. & Suri, A. A systematic review of brand transgression, service failure recovery and product-harm crisis: integration and guiding insights. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 48, 519–542 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00679-1

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