Emoticons in response to negative reviews: The underlying mechanism of altruistic motives and the moderating role of relationship norms orientation

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Statistics and Information Management, specialization in Marketing Research and CRMRecent technological developments in digital communications emphasized the need to investigate effective consumer-brand relationships strategies. Given the fact that digitally mediated communications lack for nonverbal cues, we foster attentions to the emoticons work. Little is known about the effect of positive emoticons on consumers evaluations of a company’s identity and motives, in the context of complaint handling. To gain in-depth theoretical and managerial insight, we investigate the impact of emoticon type (positive vs. absence) on altruistic motives attribution and examine the serial mediation by (1) perceived communality and warmth, and (2) perceived communality and sincere brand personality. Results show that the use of a positive emoticon in response to a negative review, leads to enhanced altruistic motives attribution, when compared to responses without emoticons. We also demonstrate that the presence of a positive emoticon in a response enhances perceived communality and, consequently, increases warmth and sincere brand personality, sequentially mediating the influence of emoticon type on altruistic motives. We further clarify our theorizing by revealing the moderating role of relationship norms orientation on motives attribution: for high communal-oriented consumers, the use of positive emoticons will lead to greater evaluations of altruistic reasons than for low communal-oriented consumers. Taken together, the current research contributes to emerging studies on the role of emoticons and relationship norms in service failure contexts