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A Study On The Mechanism Of Consumer Trust Damage And Repair After Trust Violation

Posted on:2013-08-15Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J LingFull Text:PDF
GTID:2249330371488138Subject:Business management
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Trust is the foundation of the communication between individuals and organizations. Customer trust is one of the most important social resources for enterprises, which has effective influence on branding, selling, word-of-mouth building etc. Trust has been changing in the interaction between organizations and individuals.As the competition becomes increasingly fierce, the phenomenon has been very common, that some company’s short-run for profit resulted to crisis of creditability among whole industry, and further worsen the market in sales. Since2008, a large number of scandals happened, provoking a crisis of trust in food and life safety among Chinese customers, such as "made-in-China" crises, dairy industry crisis of melamine events, Colgate-Palmolive’s toothpaste carcinogen crisis etc. Crisis eruption brings the brand by fatal strikes. In fact, the customer purchase behavior is based on their trust sense on the company. Once the trust has been abused, the customers would finally lose their confident on the company. As a result of the transgression, customers form inferences about the future behavior of the company, positive expectations disappear and are replaced by negative expectations, and customers become unwilling to expose themselves to further vulnerability. The negative inference damaged credit, brand image and customer loyalty of the company. However, some crisis is unavoidable for the company. So it is crucial for companies to offer proper solutions to attenuate the damaging effect.Based on the existing literatures, this thesis has examined the effect of initial trust and trust transgression severity on trust damage, and the role of denial and apology solutions in trust repair and restoration. This thesis set dairy industry familiar to consumers as design scene.160 valid samples were analyzed quantitatively. Analysis of the results of basic authentication supports hypothesizes. The main conclusions are as follows:Trust transgression severity and initial trust both have positive effect and interaction trust damage. Denial and apology have different effect on repair of ability-based trust and benevolence-based trust:denial has significantly better repair effect on benevolence-based trust than ability-based trust, while apology also has better repair effect on benevolence-based trust than ability-based trust. Initial trust has a positive effect on trust repair. Trust transgression severity has some effect on trust repair:it has negative effect on the repair of benevolence-based trust, but doesn’t affect the repair of ability-based trust.According to the research conclusions, this thesis suggested that company could take some solutions to relieve the trust damage of transgression and repair trust. The specific solutions included:pay attention to the consumer trust, focus on the consumer benefit, deal with consumer trust violation properly and promptly, build the appraisal system of consumer trust.Finally, this thesis analyzes the limitation and indentifies possible future direction.
Keywords/Search Tags:consumer trust, trust violation, trust repair, ability, benevolence
PDF Full Text Request
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