When Impact Appeals Backfire: Evidence from a Multinational Field Experiment and the Lab

Abstract

Firms often try to motivate customers to share feedback by telling customers that their feedback will have an impact on the organization (e.g., “Have your say in our company’s direction”). We examine whether such “impact appeals” indeed increase compliance with customer feedback requests. In a field experiment across seven countries, 430,666 customers of a Fortune 500 company received a customer feedback survey invitation email where the subject lines were manipulated. Contrary to our initial prediction and expert forecasts, we found that impact appeals on average decreased feedback provision (compared to a straightforward control message). Importantly, impact appeals backfired to a greater extent in countries with lower trust in business (e.g., Japan) than in countries with higher trust in business (e.g., China). We theorize that impact appeals are more likely to reduce compliance among customers with lower trust in business because these customers perceive impact appeals as more inauthentic. Pre-registered lab experiments (N=7,926) support our theoretical account and test more effective impact appeals informed by it. This research sheds light on when and why highlighting impact can fail to motivate customers and even backfire, and more generally, it advances the field’s understanding of what drives customer engagement in empowering behaviors.

Keywords: customer feedback, empowerment, inauthenticity, trust, social influence, field experiment

JEL Classification: M31