Abstract: Unethical corporate behaviors cause not only harm to consumers but also negative impact on corporate brands. A meaningful way to facilitate corporate crisis management is to deeply analyze the impact of unethical corporate behavior on consumer, but existing researches do little in this regard. Through experimental research, this paper explores the impact from three aspects: The types of unethical corporate behavior, the influence mechanism of unethical behavior on consumers and the moderator effect of consumer power. Results show that: Firstly, unethical corporate behavior causes decline of the corporate performance evaluation, moral evaluation and brand evaluation. The higher the relevancy between the unethical corporate behavior and the product, the lower the consumers’ moral evaluation and brand evaluation. secondly, moral decoupling has a mediating role between unethical corporate behavior and consumer evaluation. Finally, consumer power has a significant moderator effect on mediating role, high-power consumers are more willing to evaluate the unethical corporate behavior through the moral decoupling mechanism, and the moral evaluation and brand evaluation of corporate are lower. The conclusions enrich the theoretical framework of CSR and provide strategic suggestions for preventing unethical corporate behavior and offsetting the negative effects of unethical corporate behavior.

Key words: unethical corporate behavior, moral decoupling, consumer power, situated focus theory of power