Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how customers’ word of mouth (WOM) behaviors differ based upon emotional engagement (EE) levels towards the brands they use in different industry categories. This research contributes to the engagement literature by providing new insight into the relationship between EE and WOM behaviors. Specifically, we examine how customers’ WOM behaviors relate to different levels of positive and negative EE. We find that high self-brand connection among consumers that are high in both positive and negative EE generates the most online WOM. We refer to this surprising relationship as the Emotional Engagement Paradox.
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Notes
- 1.
Respondents were allowed to provide answers regarding up to two brands. As such, the cases are not entirely independent. So in addition to the one-way ANOVA tests (the assumptions of which are not entirely satisfied), we also ran mixed regression models, including respondent ID as a random effect and controlling for sector of the brand(s) rated. The results of the mixed models are substantively similar to the ANOVA tests with regard to the statistical significance of quadrant assignment. We present the significance test results of the ANOVA in Table 13.1 for simplicity sake. Averages in the table are calculated directly from the respondent-rating level data without any intermediate aggregation to the brand level (i.e. a brand rated by multiple respondents is included in the calculation of the quadrant average multiple times).
- 2.
The highest mean repurchase intention was associated with high positive and negative EE instead of positive EE only. It should be noted that in both analyses, the mean repurchase intention levels were very close for the positive/negative EE quadrant and the positive-only EE quadrant. Additionally, “Posted negative comment about [company/brand] on forums/blogs (When asked)” and “Given a negative review about [company/brand] online (When asked)” appear in the no EE quadrant.
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Aksoy, L., Keiningham, T.L., Buoye, A., Ball, J. (2018). The Emotional Engagement Paradox. In: Palmatier, R., Kumar, V., Harmeling, C. (eds) Customer Engagement Marketing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61985-9_13
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