When Appealing to Agency Backfires: Evidence from a Multinational Field Experiment and the Lab

Abstract

Firms often use appeals like “Your voice matters” or “Have your say in our company’s direction” when attempting to increase customer engagement. We examine whether trying to motivate people by persuading them that their behavior is consequential – a tactic that we call an “agency appeal” – is effective in increasing customers’ willingness to offer feedback. In a field experiment across seven countries, we invited 430,666 customers of a large technology company to take a voluntary customer feedback survey and manipulated the subject line of the email invitations. Contrary to our initial prediction and expert forecasts, we found that agency appeals on average decreased feedback provision (compared to a straightforward control message). Importantly, agency appeals reduced feedback provision in countries with low trust in business (e.g., Japan), while producing positive effects in countries with high trust in business (e.g., China). We theorize and offer pre-registered lab evidence (N = 1,505) that agency appeals reduce compliance among customers with low trust in business because these customers perceive agency appeals as inauthentic. Altogether, this research advances the field’s understanding of when and why appealing to agency fails to motivate customers and even backfires.