We spend so much time dealing with brands on a regular basis that we can even think of them as people in our lives. We meet, we fall in love, and we settle down for life. Or we don’t. What happens then?

“When Good Brands Do Bad,” a study from the Journal of Consumer Research in 2004, set out to determine how likely we are to forgive mistakes and stay put or walk out the door and never look back. It started by creating two different brand personalities – a ‘sincere’ brand a ‘fun’ brand – for a digital photography website and recruiting two identical samples to bond with each.  

As is often the case with real people in our lives, consumers were more likely to develop strong and consistent relationships with the sincere brand. With the fun brand, feelings were prone to peaking and crashing repeatedly. This pattern held over the entire period of the study (consumers interacted with the brands one to three times each week), provided nothing went wrong.

However, the results following a transgression by each brand ‘personality’ (like accidentally losing uploaded photographs) were not expected. The relationship with the sincere brand remained irreparably damaged even after a genuine apology (and restoration of the pictures). With the fun brand, the transgression was forgiven and the relationship even improved after nothing more than a casual “sorry, my bad”. It seems that because the relationship with the fun brand looked set to deteriorate even if the transgression did not occur, the apology was viewed as an unexpected treat. As the authors state, “The event allowed trust, accountability and responsibility to be established for the first time.” People expected the sincere brand to have known better than to mess up in the first place! 

Does this mean all brand relationships should be based on the belief that consumers are drawn to drama and simply want to break free from conventional ways? Given that the study used only two months to create connections with dichotomised personalities in a single product category, further research is needed. We know that trust is a cornerstone of brand equity and that the ideal would be to find a balance between sincerity and fun (i.e. stable but not staid).  We also know that transgressions can serve as defining moments that strengthen (or in some cases, weaken) relationships with brands. The classic example we’ve all heard of is Johnson & Johnson. The company responded quickly and honestly to the problem of tainted Tylenol in the 1980s. Its drastic steps in package redesign ensured tampering didn’t happen again and it regained consumer trust and loyalty. 

Of course, this doesn’t give strong brands the freedom to do as they please. A good idea is to apologise quickly, accept full responsibility and always be sincere. Openly acknowledging that you made a mistake and are doing all you can to resolve it shows you’re human after all. As long as you have a plan, it really doesn’t need to be a complete wreck. In fact, with the increasing speed at which brand mistakes turn into PR nightmares, putting a plan together now wouldn’t hurt either.

For more information, contact the Synovate Brand and Communications team.