Consumer forgiveness: A literature review and research agenda

Consumer forgiveness represents a compelling phenomenon for marketers, as understanding and leveraging forgiveness allows repairing consumer brand relationships. Marketing scholars began to pay closer attention to consumer forgiveness in the last decade with attempts to better understand and analyze this construct. This literature review on consumer forgiveness seeks to enrich the discourse on this phenomenon through a comprehensive systematic review of 89 articles. Through this literature review, we synthesize the findings of 89 articles to (1) understand how involved agents (e.g., firms/brands, humans, and autonomous technologies) influence the consumer forgiveness process, (2) develop a theoretical integrative framework delineating salient psychological mechanisms of the consumer forgiveness process, and (3) propose a future research agenda on consumer forgiveness.