The effects of crisis response strategy, tone of voice and culture on consumers’ responses to organizational crisis communication on Instagram.
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2020-07-16
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en
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This study aimed to research online crisis communication cross-culturally. The research question asked about the effects of crisis response strategies (individual accommodative vs. collective accommodative) and tone of voice (conversational human voice vs. corporate voice) in crisis communication on Instagram on Dutch and Spanish consumers’ perceived organizational reputation, word-of-mouth intention, and purchase intention. The importance of this study lies in the little number of cross-cultural studies that exist on crisis communication, but also on the quick development of social media platforms used nowadays for crisis communication. In an online experiment with a 2x2x2 between-subjects design, 124 Dutch and 139 Spanish consumers reacted to crisis communication messages in which a cosmetics company reacted to an organizational crisis, using Instagram. The respondents were exposed to one of four messages in which either a conversational human voice or a corporate voice, and either an individual accommodative or a collective accommodative crisis response strategy was used. It was expected that Dutch respondents, scoring higher on Hofstede’s individualism scale, would generate more positive consumer responses to an individual accommodative response strategy and a conversational human voice. In contrast, Spanish consumers would react more positively to a collective accommodative response strategy and a corporate voice. While preliminary analyses showed that Dutch consumers were more individualistic than Spanish consumers, no effects of culture, crisis response strategy, or tone of voice were found on consumers’ perceived organizational reputation, word-of-mouth intention, and purchase intention. However, these results should be interpreted carefully since manipulation checks showed that respondents did not perceive significant differences between the different conditions. Still, it could be concluded that previous studies on online crisis communication have shown mixed results. These findings, and the constant development of crisis communication possibilities highlighted the importance of further research on contextual factors that could influence consumers’ responses, such as the social media platform used or cross-cultural differences between consumers.
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