When corporate ethical responses after transgressions fail to alleviate consumers’ anger

After corporate transgressions, crisis management research suggests that firms should use ethical (i.e., highly accommodative) crisis responses, including elements of accepting responsibility for the crisis, apologizing, and offering compensation, to induce consumer forgiveness. Drawing from research on consumer-brand relationships and consumer forgiveness, the authors take a contingency perspective and propose important boundary conditions for the effectiveness of corporate ethical responses after transgressions. Using longitudinal survey data regarding real consumers’ perceptions of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, the authors analyze the time-lagged relationship between consumers’ perceptions of the firm’s response as ethical and consumers’ anger reduction toward the firm for the transgression. Consumers who perceive the corporate response as more ethical are more likely to let go of their anger over time. Yet, this mitigating effect disappears when consumers highly distrust business in general and the industry of the transgressing firm, when they judge the transgressing firm as having a stable disposition for unethical behavior, or when they perceive the culture of the transgressing firm to be highly authoritarian. The results of this study contribute to crisis management research and practice by revealing the contingent nature of the effectiveness of corporate ethical responses after transgressions.