How The Product-Harm Crisis Affect Consumers’Behavior:From The Perspective Of Emotion And Motivation

Product-harm crisis is the occasional and widely publicity event about a product defective or harmful to consumers. Recent years, all kinds of Product-harm crisis occur frequently, bring great distress to the daily lives of consumers, and also reduce sales of enterprise products. Most literature focused on the type of crisis and the remedial response, but how product-harm crisis influence the consumers’behaviors has not been studied enough, and the consumers’ response behavior still need further discussion. Based on the review of large amount literature and case of product-harm crisis, the present thesis found out that the crisis in China was not only related to few companies, but increasing cases revealed that many companies in a same industry was involved, which academic called clusters. So it is necessary to investigate the difference between the few companies involved crisis and the cluster crisis. A variety of sources of information increase the difficulty for consumers finding the crisis cause (Laufer al.,2009). In the ambiguous circumstances, consumers’reaction mechanism is not only a rational process, and sometimes will result in "irrational behaviors". This thesis focused on the attribution of product-harm crisis, consumers’negative emotions, and motivations, threaten evaluation, and response behaviors. Based on the collection and review of former literature, this thesis built concept models, and proposed some hypothesis. The whole thesis contains three studies.In study1, the author compared consumers’ emotions between the circumstances of product-harm crisis and service failure, and confirmed anger and helplessness was the major influence emotions. Considering the circumstance of product-harm crisis, this article constructed a model to investigate the relationship among negative emotions, motivation, and coping behaviors based on theoretical analysis. Then this paper employed structure equation model to analysis the data from questionnaire survey. Anger was found to positively affect the seeking retaliation behaviors (negative WOM and switching) and seeking solution behaviors (company complaint and third-party complaint), but the role of helplessness was opposite to anger. The medication role of motivations (retaliation desire and recovery expectation) has also been proved. Retaliation desire can mediate relationships between negative emotions and seeking retaliation behaviors, while recovery expectation can mediate the relationships between negative emotions and seeking solution behaviors. The management implications for companies’ responses have also been discussed in the conclusion.In study2, the author focused on the difference of cluster level (high vs. low) on consumer recovery expectation and the immanent mechanism. This study employed a field experiment to investigate the effect of cluster attribution on recovery expectation, and tested the mediation role of negative emotions (anger and helplessness), and the moderator role of brand reputation. The results indicated that cluster attribution negatively affect recovery expectation, with the more companies involved in the product-harm crisis, the low recovery expectation being motivated. Brand reputation moderated the relationship between the cluster and recovery expectation. When the brand reputation was low, the negative relation between cluster and recovery expectation was more significant.In study3, the effect of crisis attribution on purchasing intention was investigated. In fact, product-harm crisis not always certainly decrease sales, so some core factors should be full discussed. Based on review of literature and cases about product-harm crisis, this classified three attributions (harmfulness, cluster, and duration). From the prospective of threaten evaluation of protection motivation theory, this study interpreted the negative relations between product-harm crisis and purchasing behavior through the mediation role of severity perception and vulnerability perception, and the moderator role of uncertainty avoidance. Results of questionnaire survey after "crash chicken" crisis demonstrated the meditation effect of severity perception and vulnerability perception. Furthermore, the effect of severity (vulnerability) perception on purchasing intention trust is moderated by uncertainty avoidance, and such an effect is stronger if the uncertainty avoidance is higher.