Public complaining: A blessing in disguise? Educational calling as a benevolent process that gives consumers voice on brands’ social media

When consumers use social media to complain, they threaten to undermine brands’ images and online reputations. Academics and managers usually regard such public complaining as harmful or as expressions of a desire to hurt brands. Instead, an alternative, benevolent, and educational consumer motivation for complaining on brands’ social media might exist. By specifying the nature of this educational calling to complain and the contextual variables that favor its emergence, the current research outlines the process by which well-intentioned consumers seek to help brands improve, even if it means publicly pointing fingers. Four experiments show that both desire for revenge and desire for reconciliation affect public complaining; strong ties and single deviation contexts favor the benevolent process of online complaining; and benevolent complainants are more amenable to process recovery communication that does not necessarily include compensation.