Research On The Audience’s Response And Response Strategies Under The Situation Of Uncertain Consequences Of Crisis Events

Public anxiety is the strongest emotional factor related to the perception of corporate image after the crisis,and public anxiety affects the public’s judgment of the company’s image,so how to choose the appropriate response strategy to alleviate public anxiety is crucial.Corporate image perception is a kind of property to protect corporate resources,which is formed in the intentional or unintentional behavior of the public,comes from the process of interaction between enterprises and the public,and plays an important role in communication,so it is becoming more and more important to analyze the crisis for the destruction of corporate image perception.With the accelerated development of globalization and informatization,the forms and impacts of uncertain crisis events will become more complex and diverse,requiring more comprehensive and diversified research methods and coping strategies.In addition,many academic studies discuss deterministic events,and the discussion of uncertain events is insufficient,and the combination of crisis events with uncertain consequences and corporate image perception is still rare in China,so this paper focuses on audience response in the context of uncertain crisis events,supplementing this field.This study adopts the situational experimental method to take the crisis situation communication theory and the explanatory level theory as the theoretical basis,and the probability of occurrence of uncertain crisis event consequences(high vs low)as the independent variable,the severity of the crisis(mild vs serious)as the regulating variable,the public anxiety as the mediating variable,the corporate image perception as the dependent variable,and the experimental design between the participants is adopted.Through experiments,the influence mechanism of uncertainty crisis event consequences on corporate image perception is explored.That is,whether the degree of anxiety brought by the consequences of enterprise crisis events to consumers and the public is different in uncertain situations and deterministic situations,and at the same time,severity is introduced as a moderating variable to explore the reaction of consumer audiences and corporate image perception in uncertain situations.Based on the conclusion of study 1,in order to further explore the impact of corporate response methods on corporate image perception and public anxiety,research II is designed,and apology response strategies are presented separately to explore the role of corporate image perception and public anxiety.The degree of anxiety(high vs.low)was taken as the independent variable,the type of corporate response(informational vs.affective)was used as the moderating variable,the perceptual control was the mediating variable,and the dependent variable was the same as Study I.The experimental design between participants was adopted to form two enterprise response methods by combining with each other.In the subsequent formal survey,the two experiments analyzed the anxiety and corporate image perception data measured by 320 participants after reading different experimental materials,and obtained the following conclusions:(1)In the context of uncertain crisis events,crisis events with a high probability of occurrence have a higher degree of anxiety than crisis events with a low probability of occurrence;(2)In the context of uncertain crisis events,anxiety plays a mediating role between crisis events and corporate image;(3)In the context of uncertain crisis events,consumers have a better perception of the image of the enterprise than crisis events with a low probability compared with crisis events with a high probability;(4)crisis severity plays a significant role in moderating between the consequences of crisis events and anxiety levels;(5)In the context of uncertain crisis events,the greater the anxiety,the worse the perception of corporate image;(6)In the context of uncertain crisis events,perceptual control plays a mediating role between anxiety and corporate image;(7)The type of crisis response strategy plays a moderating role between anxiety and perceptual control.The research conclusion of this paper expands the relationship between uncertain crisis event consequences,crisis response strategies,crisis severity,anxiety,perception control and corporate image perception at both theoretical and practical levels.Based on the results of this paper,it is concluded that the informational apology response strategy is the best way for enterprises to adopt strategic response methods to reduce audience anxiety under uncertain consequences of crisis events.Anxious public can get more accurate information through corporate informational responses,and then enhance their inner perception control,in turn,if emotional apology is used,the audience only gets an emotional response,and no specific information still cannot reduce the anxiety level of its audience.Therefore,when enterprises face the consequences of uncertain crisis events,informational response strategy is to show the audience more details of the incident,apologize to the victims,and let the audience understand the whole process to a greater extent,which is the most effective way to alleviate public anxiety and improve the corporate image.