Consumer Responses to Ward Firms' Service Recovery in Kuwait: Experimental Manipulations of Brand Implicit Image (BII)

Abstract

A study was conducted to test the willingness of individuals to consider firms' service recovery as a way to rebuild its image. An individual difference of brand implicit image (Bll; Sultan 2008), which is based on the Implicit Person Theory (IPT: Dweck 1986), was manipulated to examine two types of theorists: brand-incremental and brand-entity theorists. The results from a sample of young consumers in Kuwait showed that entity theorists (compared to incremental theorists) were less likely to spread positive word-of-mouth (WOM) after low service recovery, while the difference was non-significant under high service recovery. Also, the findings indicated that individual's disconfirmation bias played a mediating role in the examined effect. At the end of the research, implications and future research directions for the BII concept were discussed.