Triggering and tempering brand advocacy by frontline employees: vendor and customer-related influences

Purpose - Lawler ( 2001) posits that social exchanges create a sense of shared responsibility for outcome success. The purpose of this study is to apply this framework to the vendor/frontline employee/customer triad to examine the underlying role of emotions in how frontline employees' evaluations of vendors and customers trigger and temper brand advocacy efforts, respectively. Design/methodology/approach - With cross-sectional data from 168 frontline employees working at a leading national retailer of electronic goods, path analysis is used to evaluate the hypotheses. Findings - Frontline employees' relationship quality with the vendor and perceptions of vendors' product quality positively influence brand advocacy. Also, customers' brand affinity and recommendation preference both demonstrate a significant, negative curvilinear relationship with brand advocacy. Research limitations/implications - Frontline employees' emotion-laden evaluations of vendors and customer influence brand advocacy in different ways. Vendor relationship quality and brand quality perceptions "trigger" brand advocacy. However, customer's affinity toward a vendor's brand and willingness to seek recommendations "temper" brand advocacy. Specifically, brand advocacy effort is low when customers possess very low and very high affinity toward a focal brand - moderate affinity spurs high advocacy; likewise, advocacy is low when customers demonstrate very low and very high interest in seeking the frontline employees' opinion - moderate interest spurs high advocacy. Although ideal to examine vendor and customer emotional exchanges, using only frontline employee data from a technology-selling retailer may constrain generalizability. Practical implications - Frontline employee training programs should emphasize the customer's role in the transaction to increase perceptions of shared responsibility, as a means to create a favorable emotional experience, and accentuate timing strategies on when to pursue heightened or diminished emotionally charged brand advocacy efforts. Originality/value - This study contributes to the frontline employee behavior literature by viewing shared responsibility in transactions as a source of emotional value, explaining variance in frontline employee brand advocacy through relationship and product quality dimensions, and uncovering curvilinear effects for customers' brand affinity and recommendation preference in elucidating brand advocacy.