Abstract:

The brand-group crisis is a type of social phenomenon that very different from brand crisis, its nature and evolution processes haven’t been reasonable explained yet. Observing crises broken out among the brand-groups now and then, this study borrowed the theories of brand clusters from marketing as well as the theories of intergroup conflict and collective action from social psychology, define the concept of the brand-group crisis, and conduct a qualitative research with discourse analysis on a representative case from Tianya Froum to explain the mechanism of brand-group crisis. The authors construct a dual way model which mainly containing the path of ‘social comparison →fraternal relative deprivation’ and ‘group identification → negative intergroup emotions’, and the reciprocal effects among these two paths as well. The findings shows that, an individually service failure or product harm may provoke the dual way mechanisms, which will induce the relative deprivation and negative emotions to the group especially the disadvantaged one. Then the intergroup relationship may be destroyed by those conflicts like boycotts. The study makes some contributions to the researches on intergroup relationships and collective actions.

Key words: Brand-group Crisis, Social Comparison, Fraternal Relative Deprivation, Negative Intergroup Emotion, Discourse Analysis