【作者】 张艳艳；

【导师】 朱华伟；

【作者基本信息】 武汉大学 ， 市场营销管理， 2018， 硕士

【摘要】 抱怨源于消费者对企业产品或服务的不满意情绪,消费者抱怨会给企业带来直接性不利影响,包括降低消费者的购买意愿,伤害品牌忠诚等。社会化媒体的发展进一步扩展了抱怨的传播力和影响力,致使如何有效处理消费者抱怨成为企业面临的重要挑战。既有文献对企业抱怨回应策略的探究多以理性回应为主,然而类似策略往往难以迅速有效化解抱怨者的负面情绪,企业需要探索新的回应策略。基于社会化媒体传播娱乐性和趣味性的特点,幽默逐渐成为企业试图化解消费者抱怨尤其是网络抱怨的方式之一。既有文献从认知和情感视角探究了幽默对沟通效果的影响,然而这些文献并未达成一致性结论,同时鲜有研究探讨企业能否以及如何借助幽默来化解消费者抱怨。通过文献梳理,本文发现对幽默沟通效果缺乏一致结论的原因有两方面:一是从幽默传播的设计视角看,既有文献鲜有区分不同类型的幽默,分别探究它们的传播效果;二是从幽默传播的受众视角看,既有文献也没有区分不同类型的消费者,并分别探究幽默对他们的传播效果。为了解决这一问题,本研究主要基于良性冲突理论来探究幽默化解消费者抱怨的作用机制。首先,本文区分了两种企业幽默式抱怨回应类型:自强型幽默和自嘲型幽默。这两种幽默式抱怨回应策略在改善消费者品牌态度方面存在着不同的作用机制,主要受到消费者与企业所形成的固有关系范式影响。因此,本文重点探究幽默类型与关系范式的匹配对消费者品牌态度的影响。本文通过三个实验来验证理论假设。首先,通过二手数据分析,预研究发现相较于非幽默回应,幽默的抱怨回复可以引起消费者更多追评,以及更多正向追评,更有助于改善消费者品牌态度。为了增强结果的稳健性,实验1进一步验证了幽默(相较于非幽默)的抱怨回应策略的积极影响。通过4组组间对比分析,结果显示对于低唤醒度的负面情绪所导致的消费者抱怨,企业幽默的回应策略对消费者品牌态度的影响要显著优于非幽默回应策略。实验2探究了幽默类型与关系范式的交互作用以及良性评价的中介作用对消费者品牌态度的影响,结果验证了自强型幽默的抱怨回应对改善共有关系范式下消费者品牌态度更有效,自嘲型幽默的抱怨回应则有助于改善共有和交易关系范式下消费者品牌态度;其中良性评价起着中介作用。本研究的理论贡献集中在以下几方面。首先,本文将幽默应用于企业回应消费者抱怨,为企业负面信息回应方面的研究提供了新的视角。其次,本文将企业幽默的抱怨回应方式划分为自强型幽默和自嘲型幽默,进一步丰富了幽默理论。第三,本文从幽默类型与关系范式的匹配视角出发,探究了消费者抱怨情景下关系范式与幽默式抱怨回应之间的交互作用,深化了对幽默作用边界的理解。本研究同样为企业有效回应消费者抱怨提供了相应建议。更多还原

【Abstract】 Complaints document consumers’ dissatisfaction with the products or services,which bring out overwhelmingly detrimental consequences like decreasing purchase intention and even threatening brand loyalty.The proliferation of social media further expands such undesirable communications.Therefore,how to deal with consumers’ complaining has become one of the greatest challenges for companies.The existing literatures have mainly focused on rational responses,but similar strategies are often difficult to effectively resolve complainers’ negative emotions,companies need to explore new response strategies.Adapted to the entertainment characteristics of social media,companies are increasingly adopting humorous tactics to cope with consumer,complaints especially internet complaints.Previous studies have explored the effects of humor on communication from both cognitive and affective perspectives,these literatures surprisingly achieve no consistent conclusions.What’s more,little research has examined whether and how humor can effectively address consumer complaints.To be specific,there are at least two limitations in prior research.One is that most studies make no differentiation on humor design,especially on humor typology.The second is that extant research pays less attention on norms of the relationship between humor communication transmitters and receivers.Contributing new insights to existing work on the topic,the present research tackles this question based on Benign Violation Theory.To start with,we classify humor responses into self-enhancing humor and self-deprecating humor.These two humor complaining responses may differ in their ability to improve consumer attitude toward the brand,mainly influenced by the inherent relationship norms between consumers and companies.Thus,we mainly investigate the interplay of humor types and relationship norms on brand attitude.Three studies investigated the hypotheses.In the pretest,the analysis of secondary data showed that humorous responses to complaints were followed by more supplementary reviews and more positive supplementary reviews from consumers.Based on these results,study 1 aimed to provide a more robust test on the effect of different humor responses to consumer complaints.Results of the 2(Humorous responses:self-enhancing humor vs.self-deprecating humor)× 2(Non-humorous response:accommodative strategy vs.defensive strategy)between-subject design indicated that compared to non-humorous responses,humorous responses exhibited more positive effect on consumers’ brand attitude.Study 2 examined the interactive effect of humor types and relationship norms,and also the mediating role of benign appraisal.As expected,the 2(Humorous responses:self-enhancing humor vs.self-deprecating humor)× 2(Relationship norms:exchange vs.communal)between-subject design showed that participants in exchange norm condition were more willing to accept self-deprecating humor as response strategies.This is not the case for those in communal norm,for whom the benefits of both self-enhancing humor and self-deprecating humor appear similar.The results further demonstrated that benign appraisal mediated the relationship between humor types and consumers’ brand attitude.The research has some theoretical contributions.First,it applies humor to company’s complaining responses,which sheds new lights on the studies of complaints management.Second,it contributes to the humor theory by differentiating humor into two types:self-enhancing humor and self-deprecating humor.Third,it deepens our understanding on humor communication by exploring the match between humor types and consumer relationship norms,which is a crucial boundary condition.Besides theoretical contributions aforementioned,our findings also provide useful implications for companies to respond to consumers’ complaining.更多还原