CONSUMER RESPONSES TO CONFLICT DELISTING
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2021-07-16
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en
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The goal of the study at hand is to investigate in-store consumer responses to conflict delisting in the Dutch food retail industry. Literature suggests that consumers lose trust in their retailer as a result of conflict delisting but until now it lacked empirical evidence. Furthermore, we found that in-store communication could be an effective tool to mitigate the decline of trust in retailers that consumers experience. However, specific conflict delisting related research was still missing. The purpose of this study is to discover how consumers respond to different kinds of in-store messages that inform them
about conflict delisting, and which messages are most effective for retailers to retain the consumers’
trust in their retailer. By means of an online experiment, the influence of conflict delisting on trust in retailers of Dutch shoppers was investigated. After presenting respondents with a conflict delisting case, a significant decrease in their trust in retailer was found which means that the hypothesis stating that conflict delisting negatively impact consumers’ trust in the retailer is supported by the data. Furthermore, participants were presented the four in-store communication messages: a) apologizing to the consumer,
b) thanking the consumer for understanding the situation c) blaming the manufacturer or d) accurately explaining the situation. The results show that only blaming the manufacturer and accurately explaining the situation to the consumer have effectively restored the trust in retailers of consumers after a conflict delisting. The other two options have not proven to be effective. From a practical perspective, providing
the consumer with a specific rather than a vague explanation of the conflict delisting is recommended based on the results. According to communication theories, we suspect that this could be explained by the fact that consumers attach value to retailers being competent as opposed to warm.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen