Product Crises and Babyfaces: The Face of a Company Affects Consumer Judgments

Abstract

Search the web for today’s business news or read the business section of the newspaper and you will likely come across a headline about a company facing a public relations (i.e., PR) crisis. Take the recent headline “Edelman Eats Humble Pie, Unmasked as Force behind Wal-Mart Blog; PR Giant Does Damage Control” in Advertising Age (2006). The accompanying article and photo of Richard Edelman contains an apology by him for a fake blog that his firm created on behalf of Wal-Mart. The question we address is how consumers will respond to Edelman’s public apology for the “error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset.” How will Edelman’s apology impact consumer liking for the Edelman and Wal-Mart brands? We believe that Edelman’s photo in the news article, specifically whether he is perceived to have a “babyface” (large eyes, small nose, high forehead, and small chin) or a mature face will be one of the determinants of their response. Appearances bias impressions. Is the person attractive? Are they tall? Do they have a babyface? Babyfaced people are perceived as kinder, warmer, and physically weaker than mature-faced people (Berry and McArthur 1985). They are also perceived as more honest and more naïve (Berry and Brownlow 1989). The focus of most of the babyface research has been on trait inferences and not on the downstream consequences of these inferences, such as evaluations and judgments (Zebrowitz 1997). Also prior research has not systematically investigated the boundary conditions for this effect and it is not clear whether these inferences are spontaneous and correctible in the face of competing contextual cues. Our research contributes to the literature by addressing these gaps. We examine a situation where a company has a product-related PR crisis- their cough remedy that turns out to have side effects. The crisis results in adverse publicity-a news report of the crisis containing a photograph of the CEO. A question that is likely to be raised in the reader’s mind when reading the report is whether the company knew about the problem beforehand but did not acknowledge it publicly. One cue that might be used to answer this question is the face of the CEO and how honest it looks. Based on the literature, we expect that a babyfaced (vs. maturefaced) CEO will be seen as more honest, with attitudes towards their company more favorable as a result. If consumers are however alerted to other cues in the situation that are more diagnostic regarding intentionality, appearance-based inferences should be corrected. One situational cue is the severity of the crisis. If the crisis is severe, the inference that the babyfaced CEO did not intentionally mislead consumers is likely to be “corrected,” if they have the cognitive resources to make the correction. Attitudes towards the company should be negative regardless of the shape of the CEO’s face. Another gap in the literature concerns the previously mentioned lack of examination of the effect of face-trait associations on downstream judgments. We address this gap experimentally through the prior priming of either associations consistent with the babyface stereotype or counter to it. We also address it by creating situations in which innocence has negative versus positive implications. We take the same construct of innocence and the associations related to it to show how in a public relations crisis, perceptions of innocence arising from babyfaceness can be either an advantage or a disadvantage. In our first experiment, we manipulated the face shape of CEO, cognitive capacity and crisis severity. Participants were asked to read a fake Yahoo news article about the pharmaceutical company whose new product has been found to have side effects. The article featured a photo of the CEO morphed into either a babyfaced or maturefaced photo. As expected, babyfaceness influenced perceived honesty of the CEO, which in turn influenced company attitudes, except when many users suffered the side effect (extreme crisis). However, if cognitive capacity was limited, babyfaceness had a significant effect even in a high crisis situation. Hence babyface-honesty inferences appear to be spontaneous, which are corrected when sufficient cognitive resources are available. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that the natural association between babyfaceness and honesty/unintentional wrongdoing underlies inferences about perceived honesty and persuasion. The natural association between babyfaceness and unintentional wrongdoing was reversed by creating associations between babyfaceness and intentional harm through a priming task prior to exposure to the Yahoo article. As a result, the mature-faced CEO was perceived as more honest with company attitudes more favorable. Experiment 3 showed that the association of babyfaceness and innocence has negative consequences if innocence implies naiveté. We constructed a situation in which a company recovering from a PR crisis is searching for a new CEO. The PR crisis was either due to a former CEO’s dishonesty or his lack of vigilance. A mature-faced CEO was viewed as a better choice to lead the company than a babyfaced CEO in the vigilance-in-doubt situation whereas a babyfaced CEO was viewed as a better choice than the mature-faced CEO in the honesty-in-doubt scenario. These results provided further evidence that the traits associated with babyfaceness are used in downstream judgments. In sum, our research suggests that in PR crises, the face of the company definitely matters in most cases.