A Study On The Consumption Substitution Intention Under Food Safety Events

The KFC Fast-growing Chicken Event and Expired-meat Event have raised publicattentions and doubts on products safety status of KFC and food safety environmentin China. When facing food safety crisis,consumers are likely to find alternative waysto meet the food consumption demand, such as switching thebrand or producing category substitution wish. As consumers have moreunderstanding of the "Fast-growing Chicken" event, they will suspect other ChickenProducts besides KFC chicken products, some of them choose to eat beef, mutton andother meat.And under the influences of these events, the change of consuming behavior is notjust brand but category. There many factors affecting consuming behavior, such ascharacters of consumers, conversion costs, consuming habits, past buying experience,brand image, product categories and competition. All of the factors above cause brandswitch happens. Meanwhile, the danger of food-safety events provide consumerssuggestions and judgments whether to buy or not. Available research mainly consistof attributes below: risk, reason, harm and occurrence. But little about spillover effectof categories of one brand. Thus this article is researching factors that influenceconsumption substitution under food-safety events.In this thesis a combination of normative research and empirical study isapplied,qualitative research and quantitative research method are also cross-applied.This thesis discusses the factors affecting substitution wish,based on thechannel migration of PPM theory, then a conceptual model of consumers’ substitutionwish under the product harm Crisis is built.Research tells that consumers not only want to switch the brand, but also thecategory which the problem product belong to after the The KFC Fast-growingChicken Event. Then consumers will prefer changer the category. According to myresearch, over60%of consumers want to switch to other brands or change theproblem category, only10%not. Research of consumer characters shows that family’stotal income play an important role in brand switching. The higher the income is, thestronger their willing to switch brand is. Age and family income have greatlyinfluenced category changing. Consumers between25-39years old have a higher category substitution wish. And also, higher family income will lead to highercategory substitution.According to my research, there are three factors(pulling effect--pushingeffect--mooninging effect) influencing brand switching intention in food-safety events,of which pulling effect is the strongest. Pulling effect is stronger than pushing effectssuggests that consumers see more value in selectivity of alternative under competingenvironment of market. Mooning effect will largely decrease substitution wish. Inpushing effects, risk and cause attributes have strong influence shows that the higherrisk the food-safety event take, public will owe the cause to enterprise itself, thensubstitution wish has a higher occurrence; While in pulling effects, research suggeststhat the more attraction the substitute goods have, the higher the substitution wish willbe; In anchoring effects, higher conversion cost and better brand image will havestronger anchoring effects, then substitution wish will not likely to happen.This article is researching substitution intention under food-safety events, and ithas benefits as below:1. theoretically supplement and perfect research about brand switching andconsuming substitution under product harm crisis.2. provide scientific basis in mentality and behavior when analyzing consumerreaction mechanism and build strategy under emergencies.3. provide marketing suggestions to decrease substitution wish.Two innovation of this thesis include:1. building a Consumption Substitution intention model according to PPM theory2. researching spillover effects in product category of food-safety events based onbrand switching.