The Iowa Stater, Feb. 1998

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The Iowa Stater
Feb. 1998

The buzz . . .

Unhappy customers like to tell others how unhappy they are. Known as negative word-of-mouth communication, it's a nagging pain in the neck to even the most experienced marketing mogul.

Not to worry. Three Iowa State marketing professors have found that negative word-of-mouth communication might not be so bad for business.

The researchers -- Russ Laczniak, Thomas DeCarlo and Sridhar Ramaswami -- conducted a study of how 300 college students reacted to negative information about brands of personal computers.

"We wanted to look at how people process negative information," said Laczniak. "We expected participants to either change their minds about a brand or discard the information completely."

But what the researchers didn't expect was that 16 percent of the survey students who received negative information about a brand not only ignored it, but rallied to the brand's defense.

Why? The more consumers hear about a brand, the more established that brand becomes in their minds. In marketing circles, this is known as brand identification. A product's brand identification serves as a shield against negative word-of-mouth communication, DeCarlo said. Negative information tends to bounce right off this shield, whether or not the consumer realizes it.

That should be music to the ears of marketing execs trying to justify multimillion dollar ad campaigns to their CEOs, since brand identification typically is established through advertising.

"Our research indicates that negative word-of-mouth commu-nication does impact the consumer," Ramaswami said. "But the important message for companies is that the impact isn't always negative."

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