Agricultural Brand Crisis’ S Internet Spillover Effects On Competing

In recent years, China has undergone more and more frequent food safety events in the field of public health. Those food safety incidents not only damage the performance and credibility of the crisis enterprise itself, but also endanger other brands in the industry and indirectly reduce consumers’ evaluation of competing brands, causing negative spillover effect and decreasing the credibility of the whole industry. Internet as a new technology has brought profound changes to information dissemination. With the development of information technology and the popularity of the Internet, the spread of information is no longer confined to traditional media such as television, radio and face-to-face word of mouth spread, but it’s more dependent on the emerging and diversified online medias. Once food safety events happened, a large number of reports on the Internet will come into form, the number of audience increasing exponentially. Consumers on the network platform will browse, review and forward network reports, thus arising widespread attention and leading to unpredictable impact.In the face of the growing number of food safety events, people from all walks of life must draw lessons from them. In the era of Internet, many issues are to be explored, such as whether consumers’ evaluation for competing brands is affected by different types of brand crisis, whether network public opinion consistency is playing an increasing role in negative spillover effects and what the mechanism of network negative spillover effect is.This paper mainly adopts literature analysis method to organize research results of predecessors and based on the prior research put forward our own research model. In this paper experimental method will be used to explore the interacting effects between different types of brand crisis and consistency of network public opinion consistency as well as the mediating role of consumers’ perceived legitimacy. Based on literature review, this article classifies brand crisis into functional-related crisis and values-related crisis, dividing network public opinion consistency into consistency and inconsistency. This paper also introduces social legitimacy and pragmatic legitimacy of perceived legitimacy, trying to explore its mechanism. The experimental data of this study are collected through the network platform. SPSS19.0 will be used to analyze the data by descriptive statistics analysis, reliability, validity analysis, independent sample test, analysis of variance and multiple factor analysis of variance.The empirical results show:(1) there is an interacting effects between brand crisis type and the network public opinion consistency on internet spillover effects; more specifically, when values-related crisis happen, compared with network public opinion inconsistency, network public opinion consistency will cause stronger network spillover effect. When performance-related crisis happen, compared with network public opinion consistency, network public opinion inconsistency will cause stronger network spillover effect.(2) There is an interacting effects between brand crisis type and the network public opinion consistency on perceived legitimacy; more specifically, when values-related crisis happen, compared with network public opinion inconsistency, network public opinion consistency will cause bigger reduce in perceived social legitimacy. When performance-related crisis happen, compared with network public opinion consistency, network public opinion inconsistency will cause bigger reduce in perceived pragmatic legitimacy.(3) The consumers’ perceived legitimacy plays a mediating role in the interacting relationship between the brand crisis type and network public opinion on network spillover effect.These findings further enrich the theoretical basis of spillover effect and fill a gap in the field of brand crisis spillover effect in the marketing theory. After bringing Internet into the field of marketing, this paper provides suggestions on how to respond to brand crisis in the business practices.