Consumers’ choice and relationship with the goods and services they purchase can be complex – and surprising. One such example is blame for when things go wrong. Prof. Laurence Ashworth, Associate Dean of Research at Smith School of Business, shares his research into how our fear of appearing incompetent makes us distort the truth on a bad buy. From an interview with Professor Adrian Zicari, ESSEC Business School, Council on Business & Society.
A Bad Buy? I should have known better! by Laurence Ashworth and Adrian Zicari.
Professor Adrian Zicari: Professor Laurence Ashworth from Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Canada – welcome.
Professor Laurence Ashworth: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Adrian Zicari: Today, I would like to talk about your recent paper I should have known better! It’s a research paper published in the Journal of Business Research and with both a very curious and very promising title.
Laurence Ashworth: Well, thank you. The title I should have known better! is really capturing the essence of what we were studying. This idea is that people, even when they’ve had a negative product experience, or a dissatisfying experience, maybe won’t always share information about the experience because they partly blame themselves. They feel like they should have known better.
The effect is that they believe that, if they share information about the negative experience, it might reflect poorly on them. In other words, it might create a negative impression in their audience, so they sometimes refrain from revealing anything about the situation.
Bad buys and the blame game
Adrian Zicari: So, imagine I go to a travel agency and buy a tour package to travel somewhere on holidays. I then have a bad experience and instead of criticizing the company, I refrain from doing so.
Laurence Ashworth: Well, sort of. It’s not instead of criticizing the company. This is actually one of the points that we uncovered in the research. Certainly, that’s the way we normally think about blame—you either blame the firm or you blame yourself, along a spectrum, I should say. The more you blame the firm, the less likely to blame yourself and vice versa.
What we were saying was a little bit different. We were saying that even when you blame the firm, even when you attribute the dissatisfying experience to the firm—for example, it was just a poorly run hotel with terrible service, a case where it’s pretty clear you would indeed blame the firm—it may be possible that consumers sometimes also blame themselves somewhat.
We found evidence that they could, and what was driving that was these thoughts about alternative actions the consumer could have taken. Thoughts like, “maybe I didn’t have to choose that hotel,” for example. Because of such counterfactuals—thoughts that you could have done something different that would have avoided the outcome in some way—people felt some responsibility for the outcome, even while understanding that fault really lay with the firm.
That was part of what we thought was the interest value here—that even when you blame the firm, and where traditional research in marketing would suggest you’re unlikely to blame yourself, we found people can indeed blame themselves – and it occurs when there’s the possibility that you can see these alternative courses of action that you could have taken to avoid that outcome.
Finding fault in a faulty buy
Adrian Zicari: I also like in your paper that you make a distinction between the fault that lies with the company and the fault that lies with the customer him or herself.
Laurence Ashworth: Yes, that’s right. Exactly. There are two broad sources of fault: there’s fault that in some sense is “direct” fault for the dissatisfying experience. Is it because, for example, I used this product incorrectly, or is it because the product’s defective? There’s a spectrum where you could blame it on the firm or you blame it on yourself. But then there’s this second source of blame attribution, which relates to the things you could have done that led to that outcome. These sorts of indirect attributions.
They can work at the same time as the direct, immediate causes of blame. That’s not really something that I think prior to this paper had been discussed much. They can cause a situation where consumers simultaneously blame the firm and themselves. Both are going on. It’s bizarre, but it’s because the sources of this blame are different.
Bad Buys: Certain products and services trigger blame more than others
Adrian Zicari: You also say that there are some products or some industry services that are more prone to this situation.
Laurence Ashworth: Yes, the way we looked at it was that there are some situations where consumers are more likely to feel they could have avoided any bad outcome, but at the same time that means there are likely some product classes where that’s typically the case as well. One of the examples we use in the paper is being given a gift card to make a purchase. Well, one of the things a gift card does is that it constrains your choice of actions. You no longer get to choose the store. That’s determined by someone else. It actually makes it more difficult for you as a consumer to think in retrospect of alternative courses of action you could have taken and, therefore, what you could have done to avoid any bad outcome.
If something bad does happen, because you can’t think of different things you could have done—I couldn’t have gone to a different store, for example—you are unlikely to blame yourself. But if you choose to go to the store and the same bad thing happens, you can. It’s easier to think of alternative courses of action in this case, so you’re more likely to blame yourself. You don’t blame the firm any less than you do with the gift card. That firm blame is the same.
In the latter case, when you made the choice to visit the store, there’s just more degrees of freedom, as it were, that you can look back on in retrospect and say I could have done something different, and referring to the paper’s title again, think “I should have known better”. Even though there’s no way you could have known better ahead of time. You don’t have that information. That’s just life. In life, you make some choices that don’t turn out well, but you couldn’t necessarily have avoided that choice.
We identified this phenomenon by testing that, and by looking at these different situations. Almost certainly, though, there are some choices where people feel more constrained. Whether or not they’re truly constrained is a different question, but there are choices where you feel constrained. In general, I think what we would say is that the more constrained you feel in taking those courses of actions, the less likely you are to see this phenomenon that we identified – this self-blame – and then this restriction in terms of the word-of-mouth that people share.
Useful links:
- Link up with Profs. Laurence Ashworth and Adrian Zicari on LinkedIn
- Read a related article: Mothers & daughters in Japan: Who influences who when buying clothes?
- Discover Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Canada
- Browse the Smith MBA portfolio and apply.
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The Council on Business & Society (The CoBS), visionary in its conception and purpose, was created in 2011, and is dedicated to promoting responsible leadership and tackling issues at the crossroads of business and society including sustainability, diversity, ethical leadership and the place responsible business has to play in contributing to the common good.
Member schools are all “Triple Crown” accredited AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA and leaders in their respective countries.
- ESSEC Business School, France-Singapore-Morocco
- FGV-EAESP, Brazil
- School of Management Fudan University, China
- IE Business School, Spain
- Keio Business School, Japan
- Smith School of Business, Canada
- Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa
- Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- Warwick Business School, United Kingdom.
