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There is limited insight concerning a firm’s remedy choice after a product recall. This study aims to propose that failure severity and brand equity are key antecedents of remedy choice and provides empirical evidence for a non-linear relationship between pre-recall brand equity and the firm’s remedy offer that is moderated by severity.

This study uses field data for 159 product recalls from 60 brands between January 2008 to February 2020 to estimate a probit model of the effects of failure severity, pre-recall brand equity and remedy choice.

Firms with higher and lower pre-recall brand equity are less likely to offer full (vs partial) remedy compared to medium level pre-recall brand equity firms. Failure severity moderates this relationship positively, i.e. firms with low and high brand equity are more sensitive to failure severity and then select full instead of partial remedy.

This research reconciles contradictory arguments and research results about failure severity as an antecedent of remedy choice by introducing brand equity as another key variable. Future research could examine the psychological process of managerial decision-making through experiments.

This study increases the awareness of the importance of remedy choice during product-harm crises and can help firms and regulators to better understand managerial decision-making mechanisms (and fallacies) during a product-harm crisis.

This study theoretically and empirically advances the limited literature on managerial decision-making in response to product recalls.

This study aims to examine how characteristics of an online review and a consumer reading the review influence the probability that the consumer will assess the review as authentic (real) or inauthentic (fake). This study further examines the specific factors that increase or decrease a consumer’s ability to detect a review’s authenticity and reasons a consumer makes these authenticity assessments.

Hypothesized relationships were tested using an online experiment of over 400 respondents who collectively provided 3,224 authenticity assessments along with 3,181 written self-report reasons for assessing a review as authentic or inauthentic.

The findings indicate that specific combinations of factors including review valence, length, readability, type of content and consumer personality traits and demographics lead to systematic bias in assessing review authenticity. Using qualitative analysis, this paper provided further insight into why consumers are deceived.

This research showed there are important differences in the way the authenticity assessment process works for positive versus negative reviews and identified factors that can make a fake review hard to spot or a real review hard to believe.

This research has implications for both consumers and businesses by emphasizing areas of vulnerability for fake information and providing guidance for how to design review systems for improved veracity.

This research is one of the few works that explicates how people assess information authenticity and their consequent assessment accuracy in the context of online reviews.

Negativity towards a brand is typically conceived as a significant problem for brand managers. This paper aims to show that negativity towards a brand can represent an opportunity for companies when brand polarization occurs. To this end, the paper offers a new conception of the brand polarization phenomenon and reports exploratory findings on the benefits of consumers’ negativity towards brands in the context of brand polarization.

To develop a conception of brand polarization, the paper builds on research on polarizing brands and extends it by integrating insights from systematic literature reviews in three bodies of literature: scholarship on brand rivalry and, separately, polarization in political science and social psychology. Using qualitative data from 22 semi-structured interviews, the paper explores possible advantages of brand polarization.

This paper defines the brand polarization phenomenon and identifies multiple perspectives on brand polarization. Specifically, the findings highlight three distinct parties that can benefit from brand polarization: the polarizing brand as an independent entity; the brand team behind the polarizing brand; and the passionate consumers involved with the polarizing brand. The data reveal specific advantages of brand polarization associated with the three parties involved.

Managers of brands with a polarizing nature could benefit from having identified a group of lovers and a group of haters, as this could allow them to improve their focus when developing and implementing the brands’ strategies.

This exploratory study is the first explicitly focusing on the brand polarization phenomenon and approaches negativity towards brands as a potential opportunity.

This study examines the extent to which brand-level satisfaction scores are related to loyalty metrics, controlling for the double jeopardy effect as well as the demographic profile of the brand’s customer base.

The study uses data for brands in three UK financial services categories: banks, car/home insurance, and life insurance. Regression analysis is used to examine the relationships between brand size, satisfaction levels, demographic profiles, and loyalty.

Firstly, the study finds a strong “double jeopardy” association. That is, larger brands have more loyalty, both in terms of behavior and stated preference. Next, brands with higher satisfaction scores tend to have somewhat higher first-preference loyalty, controlling for the double jeopardy effect. There are mixed results in relation to satisfaction’s link to behavioral loyalty. Lastly, aspects of a brand’s demographic profile, particularly in terms of whether it skews towards high-income customers, are associated with somewhat lower loyalty metrics, both behavioral and conative.

The findings represent an original contribution by translating what have been to date principally individual-buyer level associations (between satisfaction, demographics and loyalty) into brand-level relationships that are arguably more relevant to managers who act on this level of reporting.