Currently, businesses use a variety of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as service robots (Wirtz et al., 2018). Aside from the innumerable benefits, their quick and broad deployment has also led to a number of problematic issues (Honig & Oron-Gilad, 2018). For example, several studies focused on how people reacted to failing algorithms (Srinivasan & Sarial-Abi, 2021). Even fewer studies investigated how people react when robots fail (i.e. Choi et al., 2021). Prominent marketing strategies involved depicting resilient and well-engineered robots in states of falling, failing, beating up, and aiming at evoking various feelings (i.e. empathy, warmth, or comfort). Despite it being a significant phenomenon, almost no previous research investigated how consumers react to robots depicted as falling, failing, beaten up, or lost (see Table 1 for a list of popular robot failures and falls). 

The most prominently portrayed type of robot failure in popular media is “the fall.” In this research, our goal is to investigate what people think and feel about the phenomenon of "failing robots" in the context of a "fall, as consumers evaluate the same technology (i.e., robots) in somewhat diverse ways (Siino & Hinds, 2005; Gretzel & Murphy, 2019). We present the initial findings of our content analysis to pinpoint the specific concepts consumers focused on when formulating their thoughts and feelings on falling robots.