How your business’ ‘warmth score’ can help with customer complaints

When a consumer has a bad experience involving a company’s products – be it purchasing a car with a safety defect, becoming the victim of a data breach or having baggage lost by an airline – you might think he or she wouldn’t care too much about the business’ good intentions.

But the opposite appears to be true. When deciding whether to report a negative incident, customers seem to be more influenced by whether they think the company is friendly, sincere and well-intended – a quality that marketing academics and practitioners call “brand warmth” – than by whether they think the company can produce high-quality products, or what marketers call “brand competence”.