New Product Adoption Under Fear and Anger: The Role of Communication Strategies

Negative consumer emotions can lead to new product failure. Yet, research offers limited insight into how firms communicate with consumers experiencing such emotions and how this influences emotional regulation. This study examines three communication strategies — information provision, perspective-taking, and happiness demonstration — that firms employ when addressing consumer fear and anger. Through a series of experiments in the context of functional food products, we demonstrate that providing information about the new product facilitates emotional regulation and encourages consumers to (re)consider adoption. Interestingly, we found that regulating discrete emotions (fear or anger individually) is more challenging than managing mixed emotions (fear and anger combined). Additionally, our findings indicate that communication is more effective in mitigating fear than anger. We contribute to the literature on new product adoption by providing a nuanced account of the role of negative emotions in new product adoption. We show how different communication strategies influence negative emotion regulation and thus the adoption of new products.