| Strategic Marketing recognizes the value of adapting the actions of the corporation to the dynamic external business environment. An important research area that is relevant to strategic marketing is Issues Response. The objective of Issues Response is to provide the corporation with a set of corporate responses which offer more positive alternative interpretations of a perceived marketing failure event. If effective, the corporate response reduces or eliminates the negative repercussions of the reproached marketing activity on the organization's present or future strategies.;The objective of this paper is to evaluate empirically, using Impression Management theory, the ability of the different response options to affect the image of a corporation. A factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the independent and interactive effects of the stakeholder's perceived level of gravity of the marketing failure event and the corporation's response choice on the corporation's perceived image. An apology was found to be the response most robust to changes in the level of gravity. For every product safety scenario, the average corporate image of a firm offering the apology was the highest. A justification, the most commonly used form of corporate response by organizations, was found to have little positive impact on the image of the corporation, and in some cases did exacerbate the negative impact of a marketing failure event. |
