Which is the lesser evil? A quantitative study on reputational crises' impact on consumer based brand equity

Abstract: A brand reputation is constantly in danger of being tarnished whether it is by their owninability to meet consumers’ standard when it comes to product quality, their disregardfor ethical business, or being unlucky with the force of nature. But one crisis is seldomlike another, and neither are their effects. This study utilizes dimensions of consumerbased brand equity in order to explore how reputational crises stemming in a corporation’sown ability to produce quality goods and reputational crises stemming in corporate socialirresponsibility affect those dimensions and to see, is there a difference? The theory used based on Aaker, a marketing researcher who has come to be a prominentfigure in terms of consumer based brand equity, Brown & Dacin who are largely to creditfor making the discussion regarding different types of crises relevant, and authors whomore often than not refer to the works of the previously mentioned prominent figures. In order to find out if there is a difference in consumer reaction between corporate abilityand CSR related crises a quantitative approach where means from a population, dividedinto two groups which received similar questionnaires with the same brand but thecorporate ability or CSR crisis being the difference, were compared in order to find anypotential differences between the groups. The results from the survey were that corporate ability and CSR had a negative effect onpurchase intention while there was no difference in the magnitude of the negative effect,likewise regarding product evaluation CSR and corporate ability had a negative effectwhile there was no difference in the magnitude of the effect, and for corporate evaluationCSR had a negative effect while corporate ability had no negative effect. To elaborate onthis study, further research which includes variables such as brand loyalty while usingother types of product categories is proposed