Are Apologies Always the Best Policy? Apologies for Service Failures Backfire When Consumers Are Not Aware of the Failure

Abstract Technological advancements enable firms to anticipate service failures and apologize to consumers more effectively than ever. However, are apologies always the best policy? Five experiments, including a large-scale field experiment, demonstrate that apologies backfire when consumers are not aware of the failure. Apologies decrease consumer satisfaction, trust, recommendation intentions, and repatronage behavior. This is because apologies increase awareness that a failure occurred. Accordingly, apologies backfire for both mild and severe failures so long as there is room to increase awareness of the failure. Moreover, apologies backfire more than notifications about a service failure because although both increase awareness of the aspect of the service experience that was a failure, apologies uniquely increase awareness that this constituted a failure. Beyond increasing awareness, apologies backfire by decreasing perceived service quality and competence. However, apologies also increase perceived warmth and honesty. Consequently, apologizing can be beneficial when consumers are already aware of a failure because apologies are less likely to backfire and more likely to enhance positive perceptions of the firm. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that apologies are always the best policy when something goes wrong and provide insight into when and when not to apologize.