The impact of brand trust and mood on consumer complaining behavior

Abstract

Managing consumer complaints is essential in the competitive business environment. Various personal or situational factors can influence consumer complaining behavior. Marketing managers must understand these factors well to understand their customers and manage their complaints. A customer’s affective state or mood can influence his or her complaining behavior since affective states interact with cognition in shaping consumer behavior. Besides, a consumer’s trust regarding a brand is closely related to his or her expectations in the consumption situation and influences complaining behavior. In this context, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of consumer mood and brand trust on consumer complaining behavior. An online survey was distributed by convenience sampling method in Istanbul between 17 October – 3 November 2020. Fifty-nine individuals with a mean age of 41 participated in the survey. The participants answered questions about their mood, brand trust towards the bank they use most frequently, and then read a service failure scenario regarding the bank’s branch services. After answering questions about their satisfaction level with the service explained in the text, they responded to questions about their complaining behavior estimates. In alignment with the service failure scenario, the participants’ satisfaction level has become approximately 1.6 over 5, indicating dissatisfaction, as expected. Findings were analyzed in SPSS. The scales were reliable with the following Cronbach’s alpha levels; 0.867 for the brand trust scale, 0.958 for the mood scale, and 0.729 for the consumer complaining behavior scale. The normality tests showed that the dependent variable, consumer complaining behavior, was normally distributed (Shapiro-Wilk test, p:0.24, skewness: -0.189, kurtosis: -0.010). The regression analysis showed that mood (standardized beta: -0.272, p=0.024) and brand trust (standardized beta: -0.288, p=0.002) had a significant negative effect on consumer complaining behavior. Two other variables were also controlled; the frequency of doing banking transactions and the number of banks that are actively used, but the analysis showed that they did not have a significant effect on consumer complaining behavior. Besides, ANOVA results showed that consumer complaining behavior did not differ across participants’ education level and preferred banking channels such as the internet or mobile banking. This study has shown that a positive mood and bank trust reduced consumers’ intentions to complain in a service failure situation. The primary managerial implication of this study is that marketing programs, personal selling efforts, and customer relationship management must focus on building and maintaining trust and commitment between their brand and customers since brand trust decreases negative word-of-mouth and reduces CCB intentions in case of a service failure. Besides, service providers must try to create a positive-mood-inducing atmosphere to decrease customer complaints. The findings support the commitment and trust model of relationship marketing (Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Future studies can employ more representative samples to reach more generalizable results. Researchers can test the findings and make comparisons across different service sectors. Further studies can also include brand forgiveness and brand personality concepts in their research models.