Research On The Effects Of Two-sided Message On Consumers’ Brand Attitude In Defensible Brand Crisis

For the past few years, brand crises occur frequently at both home and abroad. Consumers are often faced with the situation that they don’t even know whether the involved brand is innocent or not. This paper aimed to explore how two-sided message that came from different sources influenced the information selection a nd brand attitude change of consumers in defensible brand crisis. Perceived information credibility was regarded as a mediator variable that reflected the mechanism between two-sided message and consumers’ brand attitude. What’s more, this paper selected information sources credibility and brand commitment as the moderator variables to explore the boundary conditions of the influence of two-sided message on consumers’ brand attitude.This paper collected data via one pre-experiment and two formal experiments and used SPSS18.0 to make descriptive statistical analysis, reliability and validity test, ANOVA, regression analysis and paired-samples T test. Experiment one was to verify the moderating effect of information sources credibility in the relationship bet ween two-sided message and consumers’ brand attitude. Experiment one adopted 2(information sources credibility: high vs. low) between-subjects design. The brand crisis event of experiment one was the NPE crisis of N ike. There were 150 subjects took part in experiment one. Based on data analysis, there came to three important results:(1) compared to positive information, negative information has a higher impact on brand attitude change;(2) consumers’ perceived information credibility plays as a mediator variable in the effect of two-sided message on consumers’ brand attitude change;(3) information sources credibility is a moderator variable in the effect of two-sided message on consumers’ brand attitude.Experiment two verified the moderating effect of bra nd commitment between two-sided message and brand attitude change. Experiment two adopted 2(brand commitment: high vs. low) between-subjects design, including two experimental groups. The brand crisis event of experiment two was the executive standard stor m of Nongfu Spring. There were 70 subjects took part in experiment two. According to the result of data analysis, brand commitment plays as a moderator variable among the relationship of two-sided message and consumers’ brand attitude change.The results of this paper could inspire the enterprise administrators to cope with contradictory situation- defensible brand crisis. In addition, prior researches on the effect of two-sided message and brand commitment in brand crisis were in dispute. Based on the characteristics of two-sided message, this paper clarifying the influence mechanism of two-sided message on brand attitude and the difference of the effect under different boundary conditions plays an important role in both theory and practice fields.