Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Business Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusres Profiling (un-)committed online complainants: Their characteristics and post-webcare reactions Wolfgang J. Weitzl a,b, ⁎ , Sabine A. Einwiller a a University of Vienna, Department of Communication, Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna, Austria b Seeburg Castle University, Department of Management, Seeburgstrasse 8, A-5201 Seekirchen am Wallersee, Austria ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Online complaining Customer commitment Revenge Negative word-of-mouth Service failure Service recovery ABSTRACT After service failures, consumers increasingly turn to brand-created social media outlets to voice an online complaint and achieve their complaint goal. This research demonstrates that companies can benefit from seg- menting online complainants according to their prior brand commitment and post-failure revenge desire to improve online complaint handling (webcare) effectiveness. Cluster analysis applied on multi-national survey data reveals that marketers have to deal with three main complainant types: (i) ‘Revengeful loyalists’ (com- mitted, revengeful customers mainly driven by webcare-independent motives and immune to all forms of re- covery attempts); (ii) ‘Constructive loyalists’ (committed, cooperative customers with a deep interest to restore the customer-brand relationship, but high recovery expectations); and (iii) ‘Constructive unattached customers’ (webcare-receptive customers having weak relational bonds, but no interest to cause harm). Besides profiling these segments, this research shows that webcare responses help to mitigate post-webcare negative word-of- mouth when they match the needs of complainants. 1. Introduction Research has long emphasized the investigation of positive con- sequences (increased loyalty; positive word-of-mouth, etc.) of strong customer-brand relationships (e.g., Garbarino & Johnson, 1999; Morgan & Hunt, 1994) compared to weak ones. However, research on the ‘dark side’ of committed customers remains limited or led to con- flicting results (e.g., Grégoire & Fisher, 2008; Mattila, 2004). This is particularly true for consumers' reactions to service failures (i.e., si- tuations when service performances fall below customer expectations). According to Hirschman's (1970) classic model of complaint behaviors, dissatisfied customers have various ways to cope with unsatisfactory experiences: These behaviors range from passiveness (i.e., remaining loyal) to voicing discontent directly to the involved company. In the digital era, complainants are no longer restricted to traditional com- plaint channels like private hotlines, but they can now go online (e.g., on a brand's Facebook page) and share their negative experiences with the company and many other consumers by voicing an onlinecomplaint. Basically, these brand-critic comments are a form of negative electronic word-of-mouth (NWOM) – that is, written online statements from dis- satisfied customers which denigrate a brand in public (Laczniak, DeCarlo, & Ramaswami, 2001). However, the reasons why consumers write these complaints are manifold: Extant literature (e.g., Grégoire, Salle, & Tripp, 2015) suggests that online complaint goals range from constructive forms – aimed at rebalancing the relationship with the brand by seeking a problem solution – to more vindictive forms – when complainants try to take revenge by deliberately harming the brand. Revengeful complainants have been shown to be particularly harmful for the brand as they tend to intensively share negative brand in- formation with other consumers and third parties (newspapers, etc.) (Grégoire & Fisher, 2006; 2008). In search for effective means to restore the customer-brand re- lationship and to mitigate negative complainant reactions (brand switching, boycotting, etc.), many companies systematically monitor public criticism and try to interfere by means of webcare. Van Noort and Willemsen (2012, p. 133) define webcare as “the act of engaging in online interactions with [complaining] consumers, by actively searching the web to address consumer feedback”. Even though online service recovery attempts have been found to mitigate negative brand- related reactions among complaint observers (e.g., Lee & Song, 2010), literature remains unclear about webcare's effects on different types of complainants who vary in the degree of both pre-failure brand com- mitment and post-failure desire for revenge. The aim of this article is to provide these insights and help marketers to increase their webcare's effectiveness. Specifically, we argue that marketers can benefit from classifying complainants by considering both (i) pre-failure customer https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.05.035 Received 20 December 2017; Received in revised form 29 May 2019; Accepted 31 May 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author at: University of Vienna, Department of Communication, Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna, Austria. E-mail addresses: wolfgang.weitzl@univie.ac.at (W.J. Weitzl), sabine.einwiller@univie.ac.at (S.A. Einwiller). Journal of Business Research xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0148-2963/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Wolfgang J. Weitzl and Sabine A. Einwiller, Journal of Business Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.05.035