‘Yo Krispy Kreme, I Don’t ‘Like’ Your Donuts’: An Empirical Investigation into Complaint Management in the Context of Social Media

Social media is now an integral part of consumer’s lives and has unsurprisingly attracted the attention of marketers who are now trying to decipher the most effective ways to create value through these channels (Pagani and Hofacker 2011). At present marketers engage with consumers in three ways: (1) targeted advertising; (2) encouraging C2C sharing of brand related content; and (3) direct interactions through ‘fan pages’. The present research focuses on Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) focusing on consumers’ complaints on brand fan pages. This is of key concern to firms as any complaints will be publicly visible and are likely to affect the attitudes of other consumers who read them and even more if these are shared as through WOM (see Swan and Oliver 1989). Large companies, such as Nestle have experienced disasters that resulted from unsuccessful handling of customers’ complaints on social media (Lonescu-Somers and Enders 2012). When faced within a publicly visible complaint social media, marketers must make a choice of how to respond. Through in-between groups experiment (n = 200) it is the aim of this paper to test which is the best response to a complaint (leave visible, delete, reply, or encourage further consumer discussion). The following will provide a review of relevant literature.