When and Why Do Consumers Share Product Harm Information?

Consumers often encounter product harm information in different forms such as product harm crises, warnings about side effects or rumors. Cancer-causing dyes and materials used by fashion companies, such as Levi’s, Zara and Calvin Klein, brake problems in Toyoto’s cars are a few but notable examples of mass-publicized product harm information. Product harm information might have detrimental effects such as hurting brand evaluations or sales (Ahluwalia, Burnkrant and Unnava 2000). Although it is clear that spreading of such information is important, there has been limited work on understanding transmission of negative information about products. In this research, we explore when and why consumers share product harm information with others. Word-of-mouth (WOM) literature suggests that consumers are more likely to share information about products if they have a high level of interest in a product category (Sundaram, Mitra and Webster 1998). On the contrary, recent evidence suggests that negative WOM is often about other brands rather than one’s main brand or often other people’s experiences (East, Hammond and Wright 2007; De Angelis et al. 2012). Further, when individuals encounter threatening information that has high self-relevance, they engage in biased defensive processing strategies (Carvalho et al. 2008; Puntoni, Sweldens and Tavasolli 2011). These findings together suggest that higher self-relevance of the product harm information might lead consumers to share product harm information less. Sharing is interpersonal process and is not only influenced by content characteristics (i.e. relevance of the information for the sender) but also social factors such as the relation between sender and receiver (Berger 2013). Most of the existing work in WOM so far has explored the relation between the sender and recipient (e.g., tie strength or similarity to the recipient). Yet, the way individuals see themselves in relation to others (self-construal) is not always due to their chronic disposition or context, but can be also shaped through environmental cues (Aaker and Lee 2001). Self-construal can influence how individuals process information and behave in their social interactions (Markus and Kitayama 1991). We suggest that self-construal should influence sharing behavior differently depending on self-relevance of the product harm information, through three distinct processes: defensive processes, desire to reduce one’s own worries, and helping others.