Great expectations and broken promises: misleading claims, product failure, expectancy disconfirmation and consumer distrust

Previous research in the product failure literature shows that such failures have important implications for evaluations of the target product, and even for evaluations of closely related products. The current studies identify distrust as an additional byproduct of negative expectancy disconfirmation and show that such perceptions are capable of producing even broader carryover effects—pertaining to unrelated products/companies. The effects of distrust are identified through tests of mediation and moderation, and are shown to be distinct from other processes known to relate to product failure. The results also show an asymmetry in the effects of positive and negative disconfirmation, consistent with the predicted negativity bias in judgments of generalized trust versus generalized distrust. Finally, generalized distrust continued to exert a negative influence despite the opportunity to directly examine the second product, and these effects were actually augmented to some extent. The results have implications for the expectancy disconfirmation and product failure literatures, as well as the defensive bias model of distrust.