The Effect Of Negative Online Reviews To Consumer’s Brand Attitude Under Product Harm Crisis

Product-harm crisis occurs frequently in recent years, which not only causes serious damage to the enterprises, but also leaves physical injury and psychological pain to consumers, and makes a serious negative impact to the society. Internet technology has brought profound changes for the dissemination of information. With the development of information and media technology, once product-harm crisis event occurs, it will form a large number of negative reviews on the web quickly. Because of the features of negative reviews, such as wide spreading range, high speed, large quantity and anonymity, those major product injuries reviewed or forwarded by consumers on the internet, would become public hotspots rapidly, and result in unpredictable effects.Among current researches on online reviews information, the impact of online reviews to consumer’s brand attitude is paid lots of attention, however, the research of the negative online reviews and their influencing mechanism is not thorough or deep enough. So we raise the questions:Whether different negative online reviews will lead to a different brand attitude, and how is this influencing mechanism?This paper investigates the effects of negative online reviews to the consumer’s brand attitude after a product harm crisis with experimental method. Through the literature review, this paper divided negative online reviews into two types:rational reviews and emotional reviews, and build the model that how negative online reviews affect consumer’s brand attitude. The major findings are as follow:(1) Different types of negative online reviews have different effects on consumer’s brand attitudes. Rational negative online reviews has a greater impact on consumer’s brand trust than emotional ones; emotional negative online reviews has a greater impact on consumer’s brand emotional than rational ones.(2) The impact is made by different types of negative online reviews through different influencing mechanism. Rational negative online reviews will stimulate consumers’cognitive response, and thus have a greater impact on brand trust; emotional reviews will stimulate consumers’ affective response, and thus have a greater impact on brand emotional evaluation.(3) The need for cognition moderates the relationship between negative online reviews and cognitive-affective system response. Compared with the consumers of low need for cognition, consumer with high need for cognition have a more positive cognitive response to rational negative online reviews; while consumer with low need for cognition have a more positive affective response to emotional negative online reviews. This study makes a supplement to the online reviews and crisis management field to some extent, and provides some guidance for the enterprise management.