Can salespersons help firms overcome brand image crisis? Role of facial appearance

Facial appearances bias human decisions. This study's objective, leveraging facial impression bias, is to explore the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions under which baby-faced salespersons, in comparison to mature-faced salespersons, influence consumers’ decisions to reconcile with the brand after an organizational crisis. We test mediation and moderated mediation models in the UK context using experimental designs. Our findings suggest that consumers determine a salesperson's morality by their appearance, perceiving baby-faced agents as having higher moral character than mature-faced agents. This phenomenon, in turn, influences consumers’ decision to reconcile with a brand. Our findings have implications for sales representatives’ roles in brand reconciliation.