Abstract

Branding has played a critical role in the management of negative events of marketing including product harm recall, brand transgressions and service breakdowns. The treatment of isolated branding facets notably brand equity as boundary condition in the extant literature on the subject of service failure however, has resulted in fragmented corpora and siloed theoretical frameworks. This has resulted in a lack of theoretical integration across event types, theoretical lenses and branding constructs. This integrative review agenda represents an attempt to reconcile these divergent strains in terms of theories and constructs that are explored within the gamut of branding focusing its impact on one negative event in marketing in particular that is service failure. The article contributes through the identification of six insights and recommendation of four propositions for future research. The insights encapsulate the modus operandi of brand equity as both a strategic resource and volatility amplifier in service failure and recovery literature based on contextual elements. The propositions help integrate the existing divergence in service failure literature vis a vis brand equity by identifying boundary conditions like relationship norms, self-brand relevance, failure attributions and norm violations and offering an alternative to the present conceptualization of the binary effects of branding through the contingency perspective.

Keywords: Brand Equity, Service Failure, Service Recovery, Expectation Disconfirmation and Judgment Assimilation and Categorization