Coping with negative consumption experiences: how attribution influences disappointment, regret, word of mouth and complaining behaviours

Consumers generally feel bad if products or services they purchased do not deliver what was expected. For example, if a holiday destination has not met expectations consumers will be disappointed and may feel regret about their choice of holiday destination. Their level of disappointment and regret may in turn influence their responsiveness to future product and service offers and to future product and service failures. Whereas there is a large literature on post-consumption processes, relatively little is yet known about how these disappointment and regret influence behaviour. The present research experimentally investigates how disappointment and regret result from attributional processes, in particular whether the cause of the failure is deemed internal or external, and how these emotions relate to coping strategies, in particular vindictive negative word of mouth and vindictive complaining. Our findings show that when consumers attribute the failure externally, they experience higher disappointment and outcome regret, however, when they attribute the failure internally, they experience lower disappointment and higher process regret. The higher disappointment and outcome regret also foster a tendency to voice dissatisfaction, either through spreading negative word of mouth or lodging direct complaints. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that the feeling of disappointment and regret sequentially experienced by consumers act as a mechanism to unveil their coping strategies.