Audience Research Of Brand Crisis Communication Under The New Media Environment

The crisis dissemination along with the delivery and communication of crisis information, is a crisis information dissemination systems composed of various stages.As an indispensable element of the crisis communication system, audience have a significant impact on the effects of crisis communication. In the new media environment, the audience show many new characteristics and put forward a new challenge to the crisis communication. This paper take brand crisis events which had occurred frequently in the new media environment as the background, take "defamation" incident as an example, adopt a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods and divided this paper in these three follow parts:In the first part, the author showed the purpose, meaning and the methods used in writing this paper, meanwhile, introduced the world’s research condition at these days and the background of choosing this topic, then defined the key conceptions, introduced what influence will be brought to the brand’s crisis communication and the audience by the new media. All these upper research founded a base for the coming several parts.The second part is the core of this paper, the audience’s psychological changes and behavior could be found in this part. In this part, firstly, the author studied the audience’s psychological demands in the crisis and their medium contact behaviors caused by these demands. Secondly, every phase’s characteristics of the crisis had been researched and the audience’s interpretation of the information, then the audience’s psychological condition and irrational behaviors in the crisis communication process had been analyzed and shown deeply.The last part of this paper could be considered as important discussion. Upon the research, in this part, the author probed on the strategies of a brand when it was in a crisis communication. After analyzing the information flow, affect flow and the noise flow of the crisis communication, advising the enterprise and brand adopt positive actions to defuse the crisis, re-build the brand image to minimize the enterprise and the brand’s loss caused by the crisis.