Abstract: The spread of product harm crisis information through social media often attracts widespread social attention, causing significant impact on corporate image and performance. Although companies have realized the importance of crisis public opinion management, it is still difficult for them to effectively respond to the spread of crisis events. An important reason for this situation is that enterprises have insufficient understanding of the inherent laws of crisis event dissemination, so they can hardly have a clear knowledge of the dissemination characteristics and impact scope in the early stages of crisis occurrence, ending up responding slowly. Therefore, the driving forces behind the spread of product harm crisis still need to be explored. Previous researches have investigated the impact of storytelling advertising and brand stories, but how storytelling product harm crisis information influences consumers’ information sharing is still unknown. This study introduces narrative transportation theory to examine the impact of storytelling crisis information on consumer communication. Through field data and a series of experimental studies, it is found that: (1) storytelling in product harm crisis information enhances consumers’ information sharing behavior and sharing willingness (2) Narrative transportation fully mediates the relationship between narrative crisis information and information dissemination; (3) When the companies involved adopt repair strategies, the impact of narrative transportation on information dissemination willingness is no longer significant, while under denial and defense strategies, the impact of narrative transportation on information dissemination willingness remains unchanged. This study enriches and develops the relevant research on product harm crises, social media communication, and storytelling in marketing domain, and provides practical insights for crisis management.

Key words: product harm crisis, storytelling information, narrative transportation, information communication