研究通过实验法发现,品牌危机对消费者的品牌信任和消费意愿造成的伤害作用的大小会受到消费者的推理模式和品牌危机类型的影响。对于与企业业务相关的品牌道德危机,运用道德合理化(vs.脱钩化)推理模式的消费者更容易谅解危机企业,对产品的购买意愿更高;对与业务无关的品牌道德危机,运用道德脱钩化(vs.合理化)推理模式的消费者对产品的购买意愿更高。其中消费者对品牌和企业的信任起到了中介效用。
Through two experiments, the authors find that crisis type (performance-unrelated vs. related), depending on consumers' moral reasoning process type, could elicit either lower or higher trust toward firms and thereby decreased or increased consumer purchase intent. More specifically, for performance-related crisis, consumers' trust toward firms and repurchase intent will be higher when they adopt a moral rationalization reasoning process; whereas for performance- unrelated crisis, consumers' trust toward firms and repurchase intent will be higher when they adopt a decoupling reasoning process. Also the authors confirm that consumers' trust toward the firms mediates this interaction effect.