Management Review

›› 2018, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (2): 212-221.

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Exploring the Impacts of Social Class and Brand Crisis Types on Brand Evaluation and Purchase Intent

Han Bing, Wang Liangyan, Yu Mingyang   

  1. Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030
  • Received:2015-11-30 Online:2018-02-28 Published:2018-02-10

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Abstract:

Researches on social class start recently and attract growing interest among psychological scholars. The current research is a pioneer work which explores the impact of social class in brand crisis management. Through two experiments in manufactory and service industries, the authors explore the effect of consumers' social class (upper vs. lower) and brand crisis type (performance vs. value) on consumer's brand evaluation as well as purchase intent. More specifically, for value-related brand crisis, consumers from high social class have less unfavorable brand evaluation and higher purchase intent than those from low social class; whereas for performance-related brand crisis, brand evaluation and purchase intent do not differ between consumers from high and low social class. Also the authors find evidence that consumers' agency-communion orientation mediates the effect of social class on purchase intent for value-related brand cri-sis rather than performance-related one. These results suggest that firms should pay attention to consumers' social class and provide ap-propriate strategies to alleviate the negative impact induced by the brand crisis, especially for the value-related crisis. This study not only enriches the theoretical application of social class as well as brand crisis researches, but also makes practical and managerial recommen-dations on brand crisis management.

Key words: social class, brand crisis, agency orientation, communion orientation, crisis management