Empirical Study On Influence Of Brand Crisis Type On Customers’ Online Collective Behavior

In recent years, the brand crisis happened frequently and caused huge negative influence to the whole nation, just like the issue of "usage of live bear bile "of Guizhentang Pharmaceutical company and Shuanghui "lean" events. With fast development of the internet and social media, brand crises are spread widely and quickly and consumers will have more power in the internet era which will make it worse to brand and the company. The influential CCTV grogram 315 Evening Gala exposed the dirty workshop problem on the "Hunger" platform which caused over 7000 comments in its official website in 2 hours, and Baidu search index jumped to 212901, an exposure of surge 470%, Baidu public opinion of the media index reached highest value of nearly 3200 points in the next day, compared to the previous average 879 which grows nearly 260%. Lots of consumers begin to question their reliability of the delivery platform and show their dissatisfaction of the absence of its regulatory obligation which caused more negative effect on relative brand. It becomes more and more important for the company to take right actions immediately to avoid the massive online collective behavior so as to protect the brand image and properties.From the perspective of the psychological contract, this paper investigates the mechanism of customers’online collective behaviors under different brand crisis types, and defines a new classification of online collective behavior based on Simmel’s conflict theory, meanwhile tries to set up theoretical model with multiple perspectives such as enterprise responses. Processing and analyzing all the collected data in experimental methods by using SPSS 19.0, including reliability and validity analysis, paired-t sample test, ANOVA variance and regression analysis.The result shows that brand crisis indeed has significant influence on consumer psychological contract breach, which, functional brand crisis has resulted in consumer transactional psychological contract breach, and value-based brand crisis has resulted in consumers relational psychological contract breach. Transactional psychological contract breach has resulted in aim-based online collective behavior, relational psychological contract breach will result in behavior-based online collective behavior. Enterprise response strategies regulate the relationship of brand crisis type and Aim-based online behavior significantly. All the conclusions above could provide certain theoretical and practical improvements in study of online collective behavior and gives advices for involved companies to react to brand crisis effectively and immediately.