Weathering product-harm crises

By Kathleen Cleeren, Marnik G. Dekimpe, Kristiaan Helsen. 2008

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To counter the negative effects of a product-harm crisis, brands hope to capitalize on their equity, and often use advertising as a communication device to regain customers’ lost trust. We study how consumer characteristics and advertising influence consumers’ first-purchase decisions for two affected brands of peanut butter following a severe Australian product-harm crisis. Both pre-crisis loyalty and familiarity are found to form an important buffer against the product-harm crisis, although this resilience decreases over time. Also heavy users tend to purchase the affected brands sooner, unless their usage rate decreased significantly during the crisis. Brand advertising was found to be effective for the stronger brand, but not for the weaker brand.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e335d60f3249e5d9944718739d705ed3ef7a2570

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Citations in the corpus

Me, myself, and I: influence of CEO narcissism on firms’ innovation strategy and the likelihood of product-harm crises (2017, background): “…crisis A product-harm crisis is an event in which a firm’s product fails to meet a mandatory safety standard, or contains a defect that creates an unacceptable risk of serious injury, considerable harm, or death to consumers (Dawar and Pillutla 2000; Cleeren et al. 2008; Kashmiri and Brower 2016).”
Should Ad Spending Increase or Decrease before a Recall Announcement? The Marketing–Finance Interface in Product-Harm Crisis Management (2015, background): “…several prior studies have found that product recalls affect consumers and identify some factors that influence such impacts, such as consumer expectations (Dawar and Pillutla 2000), consumer loyalty and familiarity (Cleeren, Dekimpe, and Helsen 2008), and recall type (Souiden and Pons 2009).”
Assessing tourists' cognitive, emotional and behavioural reactions to an unethical destination incident (2016, unknown): “Researchers may, in particular, draw on experimental designs as found in the product-harm crisis literature (e.g. Cleeren et al., 2008; Dutta & Pullig, 2011).”
Good, better, engaged? The effect of company-initiated customer engagement behavior on shareholder value (2018, background): “Cleeren et al. (2008) show, for example, that strong brands with a strong reputation have a more robust buffer against a product harm crisis (negative event).”
Crisis Management Strategies and the Long-Term Effects of Product Recalls on Firm Value (2017, background): “…reputation (Rhee and Haunschild 2006), prerecall advertising (Gao et al. 2015), and advertising’s effect on sales or market share postrecall (e.g., Cleeren, Dekimpe, and Helsen 2008; Cleeren, Van Heerde, and Dekimpe 2013; Liu and Shankar 2015; Rubel, Naik, and Srinivasan 2011; VanHeerde, Helsen,…”
Halo (Spillover) Effects in Social Media: Do Product Recalls of One Brand Hurt or Help Rival Brands? (2016, background): “Indeed, brands often increase their advertising in the wake of a competing brand’s misfortune (Cleeren, Dekimpe, and Helsen 2008).”