The Research On The Impact Of Indefensible Product Harm Crisis Responses On Brand Equity

After Sanlu Milk Powder incident caused China’s dairy industry crisis, fast food businesses suppliers of Shanghai Fuxi Food companies due to use expired inferior meat was exposed to western fast food enterprise, and even the industry caused a huge shock. McDonald’s and Yum Brands is one of the most affected two catering companies. As an international well-known brand catering, McDonald’s and Yum has been attached great importance to brand maintenance, they are all in the event of Fuxi to react quickly and actively adopted measures, showed positive willingness to assume responsibility, a lot of measures to effectively reduce the negative impact of the crisis.In the past about product harm crisis coping styles on the study of brand equity, find out the best strategy for the protection of brand assets in more as well as the impact of intermediary factors, and a lot of theory and practice has been confirmed in the face of an excuse type product harm crisis, for the protection of brand equity, settlement, or positive responsibility strategy is optimal. In this paper, on the basis of the crisis management theory, combined with the investigation and analysis of the fu xi events, found in the practice of enterprises will take the affective response, informational response and corrective way cannot defend type product harm crisis, and three kinds of coping styles will have an effect on consumers, therefore, based on the emotional response to informational response and corrective as the classified method of crisis response, at the same time, through the deep research in the theory of brand equity, brand attitude, perceived quality and purchase intention and brand assets as the four dimensions of brand equity, and established the indefensible product harm crisis coping styles affect brand equity research model, and puts forward the research hypothesis. In order to verify the effectiveness of the model in real brand crisis situation, selects the Fuxi Event to design the questionnaire.This paper through the detailed investigation of Fuxi Event, set up a separate introduction to the basic situation of event and Yum brands involved brand. Then this article through to Yum brands’ coping styles of Fuxi Event, according to the affective response, informational and corrective respose to set the contents of the three kinds of experimental condition based on the first condition. A total of four kinds of situations as situational content of 4 questionnaires, let the four groups of subjects after reading situation answer the responses and brand equity item. At the end of the research, this article use SPSS software to statistical analyzed four experimental data. Data analysis results show that after indefensible product harm crisis, enterprises take the affective response, informational and corrective response to be able to protect the damaged brand equity, reduce the loss of brand equity and factors. Therefore, the enterprise should according to the actual situation, take effective three ways to deal with the crisis, protect the brand assets.