All We Need is Love. Do We? How and Why a Family Firm Background Affects Consumer’s Perception

This work examines whether communicating the family firm background has an influence on the consumers’ product perception as well as intended behavior. Drawing on existing literature, the influence of signaling the family firm background on perceptional and intentional variables is investigated empirically in the first study. To this end, an online experiment with N=361 participants was carried out. The results reveal that consumers perceive a family firm more favorably and attribute not only a higher investment of love, or passionate care, to their production processes, but also consider their products as imbued with love. In the second study (N=66) we used priming to examine how individual family experiences affect the family firm perception. The results show that participants in the positive family experience condition had a significantly more positive perception of a firm signaling a family firm background than participants in the negative family experience condition.