Mitigating Product Harm Crises and Making Markets Sustainable: How does National Culture Matter?

Ganganee C. Samaraweera, Chongguang Li and Ping Qing
Additional contact information
Ganganee C. Samaraweera: College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
Chongguang Li: College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
Ping Qing: College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China

Sustainability, 2014, vol. 6, issue 5, 1-16

Abstract: Product harm crisis has become a serious issue in the business world today irrespective of the crisis mitigating strategies adopted to remedy the harm. The purpose of the study is to determine whether national culture shapes consumer reactions to crisis response strategies as a result of variation of consumers’ perceptions the affected firm’s moral responsibility. The study considers a comparison of 303 marketing-based Chinese and Sri Lankan students. Findings of independent sample t tests and Analysis of variance (ANOVA) suggested that consumers’ moral perceptions vary significantly between China and Sri Lanka in response to crisis response strategies revealing a new insight in the crisis mitigating literature. A wounded company has to launch a super effort response in Sri Lanka whereas the voluntary recall response in China is sufficient in a crisis in order to maintain moral reputation. Moreover, the study reveals that implementation of an inappropriate strategy leads to significant financial and moral reputational loss to a company. Therefore, the study recommends companies choosing culture-specific response strategies in order to protect moral reputational status and to make the market sustainable.

Keywords: moral reputation; product harm crisis; crisis response; ethical beliefs; consumer based brand equity; marketing sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/6/5/2642/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/6/5/2642/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:6:y:2014:i:5:p:2642-2657:d:35811

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().