When Bad is Good
Communication of negative informationMarket-communication trendsSincerityCommunication-effectsCredibility
Within the last year many companies have proactively started to communicate their flaws and weaknesses, believing that this will lead to they being perceived as more personal and human. Dominos Pizza is one of many examples of a company using this practice as a strategic tool for communication. However, the problem concerning the above arises as we found that there was a very limited amount of research defining the effects of communicating flaws, where the company's both dispatcher and initiator. Our study aims to fill the gap between this growing trend and the limited research explaining the communication effects. The study was carried out as an experiment where a total of 420 respondents participated. The results demonstrated that communicating flaws strengthened a company's Credibility and Partner Quality. Furthermore, we found that Credibility was the most efficient factor as it was driving the brand attitude, ad attitude and purchase intent. In our study we distinguished between familiar and unfamiliar brands and found that familiar brands gain more favorable effects communicating their flaws. Our overall findings suggest that familiar brands will reach the most positive results by communicating organizational flaws, as opposed to product related, which are perceived as less severe by the consumer. We further state that the degree of severe affects the measures in a less matter than expected. Therefore familiar brands could and, dare we say, should communicate severe flaws in order to gain interest and evolvement.