The Influencing Mechanism Of Key Antecedents On Consumer Behavioral Intention During Product Harm Crises Under Ambiguous Situation

In crisis management field, Product harm crises are one of the most crucial concern for marketers. During recent years, product harm crises have occurred frequently in mainland China. And they involve almost every aspect of consumers’daily life. Based on such facts, investigations of this phenomenon have important practical significance. This dissertation which includes four separate but related researches focuses specifically on ambiguous situations of product harm crises to examine relative importance of five key factors influencing crisis management on the one hand, and most importantly the underlying mechanism of the effects of organization response, self-congruity and crisis type on consumer behavioral intention on the other hand.Research one is an exploratory study which aims to examine the importance of five critical factors (brand visibility, organization response, media response, experts response and region of origin image) influencing consumer purchase intention during the crisis under perceived severity, sex, and generation. Experiment method is utilized in this research and conjoint analysis is used to analyze the data. The results suggest experts response is the most important factor under any situations, while the region of origin image is the least important factor (the fifth important) after media response (fourth important). The rankings of brand visibility and organization response aren’t fixed. They change between the second and the third under different situation.The aim of research two is to examine the mechanism of impact of product harm crisis response on consumer purchase intention under ambiguous situation. The paper utilizes experimental method. The direction and strength of the relationships between various consumers’ attitudes toward the different response strategies and their purchase intention are assessed by using structural equation modeling (SEM) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) etc. Results of study one show that the response strategy of Unambiguous Deny has a significant negative effect on consumer empathy. On the other hand, the response strategy of Unambiguous Support has a significant positive effect on consumer empathy. All these demonstrate that proactive strategies (Unambiguous Support) is the best way to evoke consumer’s empathy and win consumer’s forgiveness during product harm crisis. On the contrary, reactive strategies (Unambiguous Support) cannot arouse consumer’s empathy and obtain consumer’s forgiveness. Empathy positively impacts forgiveness, and forgiveness positively impacts purchase intention. It is also found tolerance of ambiguity moderates the relationship between organization response and empathy. Compared with people with the disposition of high tolerance of ambiguity, people with that of low level tolerance of ambiguity tend to have less empathy when facing the same organization response during the ambiguous product harm crisis. Study two tested the framing effect of organization response. And results show that regulatory focus orientation moderates the effect of information frame on empathy under unambiguous support situation. At the same time regulatory fit of response information frame and regulatory focus orientation positively affects empathy.The purpose of research three is to investigate consumer attribution and behavioral intention during product harm crises by examining the interdependencies that exist among their self-congruity as consumers, their attributions of blame, their perceived social distance and finally their purchase intentions towards the affected company. The paper utilizes experimental method. And structural equation modeling etc. is used to analyze data. Experiment one is an exploratory study to test the self-congruity effect. In experiment two, to test the five research hypotheses, questionnaires containing a product harm crisis scenario about iPhone cellphone of Apple Inc. were distributed to respondents. Respondents were asked to evaluate the scenario of ambiguous product harm crises and answer questions regarding their self-congruity, their attribution of responsibility to the company, their perceived social distance and their purchase intentions. Experiment three was conducted in order to control other possible variables in explaining the results. And imaginary brand is adopted in the scenario of study three. Regression results of both experiment two and experiment three reveal a significant, negative correlation between attributions of blame, perceived social distance and self-congruity. The results also indicate that the lower the level of perceived social distance is, the lower the level of perceived responsibility is. Moreover, perceived responsibility negatively affects purchase intentions, whereas perceived social distance is found to be negatively connected to purchase intentions.In mainland China the phenomenon that industry-generalized crises have become frequent should be paid more attention to. Based on such situations, research four works on the impact of product harm crises in case of firm-isolated (a single firm involvement) and industry-generalized (several firms involvement) occurrences on consumer complaint intention under ambiguous situation, under the mediating effect of dissatisfaction and moderating effect of thinking mode. The research utilizes experiment method between subjects where respondents evaluate imaginary scenario of product harm crises (firm-isolated or industry-generalized occurrence) through questionnaire. The results indicate that product harm crises types (firm isolated versus industry generalized occurrence) have significant main effect on consumer complaint intention. Firm isolated versus industry generalized occurrence affects the judgment of dissatisfaction of consumer, and dissatisfaction does mediate the influence of product harm crises types on consumer complaint intention. Thinking modes moderate the effect of product harm crisis types on consumer dissatisfaction and consumer complaint intention.Managerial and theoretical implications based on the results are discussed. And then research limitations and future research are pointed out. Finally, research initiatives are presented at the part of conclusion section.