제품 실패 상황에서 브랜드 유형과 지각된 심각성 수준이 소비자의 용서 의도에 미치는 영향 : 이기적 동기추론과 회복 기대를 중심으로

초록

Product failures weaken consumer trust and trigger negative emotions, reducing firm performance. To turn failures into opportunities, it is important to understand how consumer forgiveness forms. Prior research mainly focused on firms’ responses, offering limited insight into consumers’ internal psychological processes. This study examines how brand type and perceived severity interact to affect forgiveness, testing the moderated mediation of self-serving inference and recovery expectations. Results show that under low severity, underdog brands receive more forgiveness through reduced self-serving inference. Under high severity, top-dog brands gain more forgiveness via heightened recovery expectations. These findings provide an integrated view of consumer forgiveness and offer practical guidance for firms to develop recovery strategies suited to brand type and failure severity.

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