**Project summary**
Offering an apology is a strategy brands use in response to negative electronic word of mouth. However, its effectiveness is equivocal and may depend on its combination with other strategies. We investigated the use and the effectiveness of offering an apology in webcare conversations on Twitter using a mixed method approach. In Study 1, a corpus study was conducted to examine whether and how apologies occurred in 480 webcare conversations. In Study 2, we investigated the effectiveness of apologies separately and combined with a defensive and/or accommodative strategy. The experiment had a 2 (apology: present vs. absent) × 2 (defensive strategy: present vs. absent) × 2 (accommodative strategy: present vs. absent) between-subjects design. Flight passengers (N = 151) assessed a webcare response to a service failure on the airline’s reputation.
**Data shared**
On this page we share the Twitter handles of the brands we incorporated in our corpus study. We also share our codebook used for coding the webcare conversations.The datafiles of the corpus study and experimental study are available upon request.
