The Elaboration of Ethical Brand Crises on Social Media

A crisis is a severe occurrence in the life of an organization threatening its own existence (Coombs 2007). Crises that breach the ethical values of a brand can impair the root values of the company. Marketplace resources – including brands – can be highly contested by opposing views of society (Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler 2012). Disadvantaged or stigmatized segments of society adopt marketplace resources as an intermediate step to affirm their legitimacy before a wider legitimacy is reached in other sectors of the society. Most of the extant literature on consumer identity politics (Sandikci and Ger 2010; Scaraboto and Fischer 2013; Thompson 2013; Üstüner and Holt 2010) focuses on situation of normal market practices. In these situations, consumers affirm their identity rights by using (or boycotting) products and brands, and by adopting consumption practices as identity markers. Yet, the marketplace inertia tends to weaken and postpone the effects of the consumer identity political change. A brand crisis brings instead a sudden and serious break in the normal life of a brand and thus opens the opportunity for a radical change in the brand meanings and it may represent an occasion for the stigmatized segments to prove their discrimination and assert a change in society. Conventional crisis communication adopts a Public Relations approach (Coombs 2007). This top-down managerial approach is effective and consolidated. However, social media publics ask for a renewed mindset that would take into account the power of the audience. Social media require companies to adopt a stakeholder theory (Xu and Li 2013) to approach crisis communication, so that what the audience say about the crisis is as relevant as what the organization says. The research question is how consumers debate online around the apology by the company after an ethical brand crisis.