The Research On The Influence Of Coping Strategy Of Defensible Product Harm Crisis Toward The Industry Spillover Effect

Product harm crisis refers to the events which is occasionally happened and widely publicized, either on a product is defective, or dangerous for consumers. According to “product defect or harm is in violation of regulations or related safety standards”, it can be divided into two kinds, defensible product harm crisis and indefensible product harm crisis. In recent years, product harm crisis event frequently happened, not only bringing fatal attack to the enterprise in crisis, but also bringing serious negative effects to its competitors within the industry, including the referred industry itself,thus it will bring negative industry spillover effect. Someone has confirmed that after a defensible produce harm crisis, to the enterprise itself(customers' brand attitude), the best solution is defense strategy, followed by the attack strategy and strategy of silence, the worst is compromise strategy. But there have been some abnormal phenomenon that some enterprises don't take the best solutions “defense strategy” when the defensible product harm crisis happens. For example: the Giant Can Calcium containing carcinogenic hydrogen peroxide crisis in 2004(compromise strategy); Fonterra botox crisis in 2013(compromise strategy)…… Why don't these enterprises take the optimal defense strategy for themselves after a defensible produce harm crisis?In the short term, it is bad for enterprise to not take the optimal strategy, but in the long run, this may be better for the whole category(the industry), and the enterprise will also benefit from it. Corporate social responsibility theory indicate that, as an industry representative enterprise, it has more corporate social responsibilities to undertake, and corporate social responsibility can be regarded as a kind of enterprise strategy or long-term investment, it will be beneficial to the sustainable development of the enterprise. It can be surely treated as a corporate social responsibility behavior that making choice of the coping strategy after considering the influence(weaken/strengthen) of coping strategy toward the industry spillover effect. So, choosing the coping strategy which is more conducive to weaken the industry spillover effect is better for the long-term development of the enterprise. So, it's obviously that knowing the effects of coping strategy among the industry spillover effect clearly(the size of weaken/strengthen) is undoubtedly necessary for an industry representative enterprise which is suffering a defensible product harm crisis.This paper is started from such kind of abnormal phenomenon as mentioned above, expecting to explore the influence of industry representative enterprise's strategy choice after a defensible product harm crisis toward industry spillover effect. Hoping to explain such kind of abnormal phenomenon and to provide a new reference for enterprise in crisis to make better coping strategy choice. The paper first puts forward hypothesis by using the spreading activation theory and diagnosticity framework theory,and uses field experiment to continue the research. In order to verify the hypothesis, this article selects mineral water industry as a category stimuli, use between group design, divide all the subjects into four group. The manipulated variable(independent variables)is coping strategy(compromise /silence/defense /attack), and the dependent variable is industry spillover effect with the measured variable to be consumers' attitude toward industry.Changing of consumers' attitude toward industry for the first time(the crisis caused) is industry spillover effect, and the second time changing(caused by adopting strategies after the crisis) is the weaken/strengthen influence of coping strategy toward industry spillover effect. Using the method of intercepting shoppers at the gate of supermarket to issue the questionnaire and collect data, and with the aid of SPSS paired samples T test and one-way analysis of variance to verify the theoretical model, the results are as follows:(1)Industry representative enterprise which is in defensible product harm crisis can produce negative industry spillover effect;(2)When defensible product harm crisis happens, it'll both weaken the negative industry spillover effect for the industry representative enterprise to take compromise and defense strategy, and the former is stronger; to take the silence and attack strategy will strengthen the negative industry spillover effect,and the latter is stronger.