Attributing Blame After Only a Single Exposure to a Brand Crisis Story: Why Does It Happen?

摘要

It is a well-known phenomenon that brand crisis news has a negative impact on a brand's reputation. Thus, in order to minimize the negative consequences for the brand, it is important to understand the mechanism that leads people to attribute the blame on the company, often after a single media exposure to a brand crisis story. In this paper, we investigate the factors embedded in brand crisis news stories that lead people to blame the incident on the brand. Specifically we are interested in two factors (namely, the motivational cues and additional cognitive cues) and their interplay, which are often provided in a typical brand crisis news story. We argue that intensity of the incident reported in a news story determines how motivated people will be to make blame attributions, while additional cognitive cues (i.e., consensus, defined as how widespread the effect was-in Study 1 and distinctiveness, defined as how identifiable the brand is among other possible reasons-in study 2) determine the nature of this conclusion, i.e. whether the brand will be blamed or not.