Abstract:

The increasing brand crisis draws attention of theorists and managers in terms of how to response it. Existing crisis researches aim at image repair theory and the crisis communication theory, but for many real crisis phenomenons these theories are still unable to make a satisfactory explanation. Based on social interaction to investigate the effects of brand crisis restoration, this study, focusing on the irrational behavior of consumers in the brand crisis repair, discusses the interaction ritual restoration effects of brand crisis and repair mechanism. What’s most important, the paper argues brand crisis restoration is a way of interaction ritual chain. Using experiments, the research shows two main results. Firstly, different interaction ritual has different effect. When under inability brand crisis consumers prefer compensation more than apology, while the difference of the emotional energy to repair crisis is of no significant difference; Under dishonest brand crisis, consumers focus on both enterprise's restore behavior and enterprise's emotional energy, the ritual of high emotional energy apology is optimal for crisis reparation. Secondly, the main factor about why different ritual has different effect is the value perception produced by rituals. In conclusion, this research provides a new perspective about the restoration of brand crisis, which enriches the theory of brand crisis restoration and previous research about crisis. Besides the theoretical contributions, practical implications are discussed.

Key words: brand crisis, interaction ritual, interaction behavior, emotional energy, value perception