Antecedentes e consequentes comportamentais das emoções negativas dos consumidores em mídias sociais

Abstract

Online stores are increasingly attracting consumers and have seen substantial sales growth over the past decade. Only in the last year the Brazilian e-commerce grew 12% (SBVC, 2019). As sales grow, there is a tendency to increase the number of complaints and problems that consumers face in their online shopping. Academic marketing research has over time emphasized the positive side of consumer-business relationships (FETSCHERIN, 2019). Therefore, the negative side of these relationships has been set aside. In addition to understanding why a consumer is willing to use a product, it is important to know why they would not do so. negative consumer emotions tend to appear after an episode of service failure. These failures can cause various behavioral and attitudinal reactions in the consumer. Among the negative emotions, dissatisfaction, anger, hate and helplessness play a prominent role as they lead the customer to act against companies. Among these attitudes are behaviors of avoiding the company and / or seeking revenge through the spread of negative electronic word-of-mouth on social networks, as well as comments that make a negative publicity of the company. This thesis sought to understand the behavioral antecedents and consequences of consumers' negative emotions on social media. To create and test the theoretical model, qualitative and quantitative methods were used with consumers from all over Brazil. This theoretical model examined, in three major stages, the path that consumers take after an episode of failure, namely: experience with the company, negative emotions and behavioral responses. Research has shown that there are major challenges to be faced by online retailers in Brazil, such as the improvement of the delivery process of sold products. The severity of failure has been found to influence negative feelings of helplessness, anger, and dissatisfaction, and among these, the only one that influenced the feeling of hate was the helplessness. It was concluded that feelings of consumer dissatisfaction and hate lead to avoidance behavior. That is, the consumer does not have to reach the stage of hating the company to avoid it. In addition, the feeling of hatred influences the desire for revenge that can be given by negative eWOM and online complaint for negative publicity. As a limitation this research failed to perform hypothesis testing for the negative past experience construct. Future research could replicate the theoretical model presented here with more consumers who have had previous negative experiences with online stores. Future research may further study the impact of the cultural aspect on the feeling of hate of Brazilian consumers. After this study, the question remains whether Brazilian consumers hardly feel hate or, for cultural reasons, do not like to use this term to define their emotions. Despite the limitations mentioned, it is considered that the present work contributed to the expansion of studies on the topics addressed, and it is hoped that it can promote future research on these topics.