An Investigation Towards Enterprise Behavior’s Influences On Consumer Brand Switching In Network Punlic Opinion Crisis

At present, Internet has become the tool of information exchange and thus theamplifier of public opinions. Massive public opinions are generated and distributedrapidly via network, inevitably causing Product Harm Crisis (PHC). Once crisishappens, how enterprises take an effective strategy to relieve the tension and hold downcustomer loss is vital to their future development.This paper took a review of related researches and cases, chose arguable PHC asthe research background and investigated the effects of3types of crisis copingbehaviors: active response, contradiction response, and no response, which were chosenas the control variables in the scenario simulation. According to reference researchescustomers’ trust towards brand has direct influences on the Consumer Brand Switching(CBS), so trust was introduced as a mediating variable; besides, as PHC can be judgedas risks for consumers, the consumer’s risk attitude was introduced as a moderatingvariable. Based on the above, the model of enterprise behavior’s influences on CBS inarguable PHC of network public opinion crisis was established. To testify the model, aquestionnaire investigation was conducted with422copies of effective responses whichwere analyzed with SPSS17.0. The assumptions were testified by correlation analysis,one-way analysis of variance and regression analysis.The data analysis showed the following results: to prevent consumers’ brandswitching behavior, active and contradiction responses are better than no response; toimprove consumers’ brand trust, active response and contradiction response are betterthan no response; trust takes a mediating role between enterprise coping behavior andconsumers brand switching; consumer’s risk attitude takes a moderating role betweentrust and consumer brand switching. At last two suggestions are given based on theresult:1,enterprises should have the awareness of social responsibility;2, enterprisesshould establish network public opinion crisis coping mechanism;3, enterprises copingbehavior should be focused around establishing and maintaining the consumer brandtrust.