The Impact Of Corporate Crisis Response Strategies On Consumers’ Negative Word-of-Mouth Behavior On Consumers

Crisis events emerge in an endless series.How to effectively deal with crises and reduce losses is an eternal topic worthy of in-depth discussion for enterprises,which has attracted extensive attention from the academic and management circles.Companies often respond to crises with apology or denial,but that doesn’t always work.In addition,previous studies are more related to the perception of trust,belonging to the psychological perception level,and less attention to the behavioral level.However,consumers’ behaviors often have a more far-reaching impact on enterprises.In recent years,consumer forgiveness has received more and more attention in the field of crisis communication.Consumer forgiveness is the key to repair the relationship between enterprises and consumers.Only by truly obtaining consumer forgiveness can consumers reduce their negative emotions,maintain a positive cognition and attitude towards enterprises,and reduce negative word-of-mouth behaviors.Therefore,this study explores the mediating role of consumer forgiveness between crisis response strategies and consumers’ negative word-of-mouth behavior.Previous researchers have neglected that the form of response information can also affect the effectiveness of crisis strategies.The public will adopt differentiated processing methods for different types of information,so this paper introduces the moderating variable of information form for further discussion.Three simulated scene experiments were conducted in this study.The first experiment was to explore the effect of apology,denial and silence on negative word-of-mouth behavior.The results show that after the crisis,the denial response strategy adopted by enterprises is more effective in reducing the negative word-of-mouth behavior of consumers,and the silence has the worst effect.The second experiment further discusses the mediating effect of consumer forgiveness between crisis response strategies and negative word-of-mouth behavior of consumers.In the third experiment,through a 2×2 inter-subject experimental design,it is found that information form moderates the impact of crisis response strategy on consumers’ willingness to forgive.Specifically,when enterprises adopt denial strategy,analytical information is more conducive to consumers’ forgiveness than narrative information,thus reducing negative word-of-mouth behavior.When enterprises adopt the apology strategy,the narrative information can strengthen consumers’ willingness to forgive more than the analytical information,so as to reduce the negative word-of-mouth behavior.By analyzing and discussing the influence of different crisis response strategies on consumers’ negative word-of-mouth behavior,this study puts forward suggestions for enterprises’ crisis public relations from the perspective of management practice,so that enterprises can cope with crisis more calmly.In the future crisis response process,enterprises should pay attention to consumers’ feelings,strengthen word-of-mouth management,timely and effectively complete crisis communication,maintain organizational reputation,and maintain sustainable development of the organization.