A Study On Business Advertising In Public Crisis

In a risk society, corporate crisis could quickly spread to the entire industry and develop into a public crisis; "melamine" toxic milk powder incident is a typical case of this kind. After a public crisis, consumers'distrust about enterprises increased, and they intend to make negative evaluations of the products or brands, which will cause a great loss to the brand image and brand assets. In order to eliminate the negative effects caused by public crisis, most enterprises will adjust their advertising strategies, especially the ad appeals to convey favorable information about a product or brand to the consumers, leading them to make purchasing decisions. In that way, the enterprises will get rid of the negative impacts caused by the crisis. But the result of the survey shows that, the effects of normalized corporate advertising campaign are not obvious in the public crisis, i.e. advertising is not powerful enough to affect the audience's buying behavior, since the public audience gets psychic anxieties and their panic mentality is particularly evident when in crisis closely related to consumers'health and safety. Therefore, searching for effective advertising communication strategies in public crisis is necessary.This study is divided into three parts.The first part, through literature study, proposed the hypothesis that the audience's attitudes change slowly after public crisis and the public advertising campaign is limited. Based on the hypothesis it put forwards the framework of this study.The second part, in order to explore what kind of impacts the enterprises' advertising will cause to the audience's awareness and purchasing behaviors after the public crisis incidents, it turns to the questionnaire approach to make a survey about consumers trust in corporate advertising after the crisis in the areas of Wuhan and Xianning. The survey covers three aspects including the content of advertising appeals, advertising media selection and effects as well ad the audience's cognitive psychology. The survey data yielded verifies the former hypothesis.The third part concludes that strategies must be adjusted to make sure corporate advertising can be truly effective in public crisis. The result shows that the audience's consuming psychology and mentality of advertising exposure changes after the public crisis. To deals with this change, five strategies are proposed like ads time strategy, advertising appeals strategy, advertising media delivery strategy, advertising audience's attitude change strategy and advertising & public relations coordination strategy. The combination of these five strategies can increase the target reaching rate of advertising and the effects of advertising campaign, then change the attitude and purchasing behavior of the audience.