Detecting, Preventing, and Mitigating Online Firestorms in Brand Communities

Abstract

Online firestorms pose severe threats to online brand communities. Any negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has the potential to become an online firestorm, yet not every post does, so finding ways to detect and respond to negative eWOM constitutes a critical managerial priority. The authors develop a comprehensive framework that integrates different drivers of negative eWOM and the response approaches that firms use to engage in and disengage from online conversations with complaining customers. A text-mining study of negative eWOM demonstrates distinct impacts of high- and low-arousal emotions, structural tie strength, and linguistic style match (between sender and brand community) on firestorm potential. The firm’s response must be tailored to the intensity of arousal in the negative eWOM to limit the virality of potential online firestorms. The impact of initiated firestorms can be mitigated by distinct firm responses over time, and the effectiveness of different disengagement approaches also varies with their timing. For managers, these insights provide guidance on how to detect and reduce the virality of online firestorms.

Branding in a Hyperconnected World: Refocusing Theories and Rethinking Boundaries

“…Companies not only cocreate brand experiences with their customers, but some are even offering consumers the opportunity to design brand advertisements (Steenkamp 2017). While research has begun examining the cocreation of brand meaning through outsourced advertising campaigns (Thompson and Malaviya 2013), extensions of this work should address various facets and consequences of outsourcing the design of brand communications to consumers Even if firms wish to maintain full control over how they design and promote brand meaning, the rise of social media has led to weakened firm control over the brand meaning in the marketplace (Herhausen et al 2019). Many-to-many communications on ubiquitous social media platforms have ushered in an era in which dynamic and real-time conversations are taking place among consumers on a massive scale (Berger and Milkman 2012;Tellis et al 2019).…”

“…From a brand management standpoint, firms need a consistent approach for identifying which consumers have more influential voices, what metrics best capture this influence, and what is the best response (in terms of message and medium) to shifting brand associations driven by outside stakeholders. This topic has recently received greater attention in scholarly research (e.g., Herhausen et al 2019), and it is generating more interest in what firms can do to manage the conversation. As brand dialogues evolve in online conversation spaces, the effectiveness of firms' engagement in these dialogues will determine the extent to which they can control, at least in part, the brand message.…”

Improvised Marketing Interventions in Social Media

“…Specifically, we use the automated readability index (ARI); the formula for the measure is: 4.71 (Characters/Words) + 0.5 (Words/Sentences) -21.43. Second, we use Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to count the percentage of positive, negative, and informal words (Herhausen et al 2019;Pennbaker et al 2015) as sentiment and informality of the tweet could influence sharing. Third, as the level of authenticity and tone of the language used in a tweet might influence virality, we account for these characteristics of content in the tweet using the LIWC dictionary.…”

The effects of online negative word‐of‐mouth on dissatisfied customers: A frustration–aggression perspective

“…The peculiarity of the online environment shapes an increased aggressive stance among customers (de Campos Ribeiro, et al, ). Although at a lower level than aggression, the frustration of online customers has been described as a “high‐arousal emotional” state indicating the potential harm of online nWOM to a provider (Herhausen, Ludwig, Grewal, Wulf, & Schoege, ). Hence, introducing frustration–aggression into the online word‐of‐mouth literature could expand understanding of the phenomenon.…”