The More Recommendation,The Worse:A Study Of Backfire Effect Caused By Distrust

The importance of recommendation for enterprises has been recognized in various fields.Recommendation initially refers to the spread of positive product information through word of mouth.Later,with the expansion of information dissemination channels,the forms and sources of recommendation are becoming more and more abundant.Product recommendation information can influence consumers’ attitudes towards products and brands and then influence their purchasing behavior.Recommendation plays an important role in consumers’ purchasing decisions.Therefore,it is also an important marketing method used by enterprises to promote the sales of products and brands.Most enterprises hope that their products and brands can be recommended as much as possible.However,some researches have found that some recommendation information has not achieved the desired effect.Consumers do not accept and respond to recommendation information,and recommendation information can not promote their buying behavior.Moreover,according to the psychological research conclusion,when consumers are under the distrust mindset,recommendation information may even cause consumers’ disgust.However,in the field of marketing,few scholars have studied the backfire effect of recommendation information.The purpose of this paper is to explore how recommendation information will affect consumers’ attitudes toward brands,including focus brand and competitive brand,when they are under distrust mindset.At the same time,it also explores the boundary conditions of the impact.The empirical research method used in this paper is the experimental method.According to the hypotheses this paper want to verify,we set experimental scenes and control conditions,manipulate the subjects’ mindset in different states,observe and analyze the result of their actions.Six experiments are set up in this paper.The first experiment proves that recommendation information has a negative impact on the focus brand when consumers are in distrust mindset.The second experiment proves incidental distrust can active the backfire effect,too.The third experiments proves the moderating effect of contextual relevance on the impact of the recommendation information on the focus brand together.The fourth experiment proves that distrust mindset can stimulate individuals’ association with the competitive brand.The fifth and sixth experiment prove that recommendation information has a positive impact on competitive brands under distrust mindset,but this positive impact is moderated by the degree of brand antagonism.The results of the six experiments in this paper prove that when consumers are indistrust mindset,recommendation information will have backfire effect,and prove the boundary conditions of the backfire effect.This research has contributions to both theory and practice field.In theory field,this study regards trust and distrust as a category of mindset,and expands the consequences of distrust from not accepting information content to causing backfire effect.At the same time,it verifies the moderating effect of contextual relevance and brand antagonism on the backfire effect of recommendation information.In practice field,this study can help enterprises find that recommendations for products and brands are not the more the better.They should pay attention to the channels,media and timing of recommendation,and choose the appropriate recommendation methods to avoid the negative impact caused by recommendation.