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This study aims to understand the impact of extreme weather events on fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) consumption and to examine the role of anticipated product scarcity and FMCG types on such behavior.

This paper conducted five studies, combining archival data analysis with behavioral experiments. The archival data included sales data from a supermarket chain and weather data from the National Weather Service. The experiments were designed to test the effect of extreme weather cues on consumption, the psychological mechanism behind this effect and moderators.

This research found that consumers’ anticipation of extreme weather events significantly increases their consumption of FMCGs. This research further discovered that these behaviors are driven by anticipated product scarcity and moderated by consumers’ altruisms and FMCG types.

Limitations of the research include the reliance on reported sales data and self-reported measures, which could introduce biases. The authors also primarily focused on extreme weather events, leaving other types of disasters unexplored. Furthermore, cultural differences in disaster response might influence results, yet the studies do not fully address these nuances. Despite these limitations, the findings provide critical insights for FMCG retailers and policymakers, suggesting strategies for managing demand surges during disasters. Moreover, understanding consumer behavior under impending disasters could inform intervention strategies, potentially mitigating panic buying and helping ensure equitable resource distribution. Last, these findings encourage further exploration of environmental influences on consumer behavior.

The findings have practical implications for products, brand managers and retailers in managing stock levels and product distribution during disasters. Furthermore, understanding the psychological mechanisms of these behaviors could inform policymakers’ designs of public interventions for equitable resource allocation during extreme weather events.

The research provides significant social implications by highlighting how extreme weather events impact FMCG consumption. This understanding can guide public policymakers in creating efficient disaster management plans. Specifically, anticipating surges in FMCG purchases can inform policies for maintaining price stability and preventing resource shortages, mitigating societal stress during crises. Moreover, these findings encourage public education around responsible purchasing during disasters, potentially reducing panic buying. By collaborating with FMCG manufacturers and retailers, governments can ensure a steady supply of essentials during extreme weather events. Thus, the research can play a crucial role in enhancing societal resilience in the face of impending disasters.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to integrate the impact of extreme weather events on consumption behavior with the psychological theory of anticipated product scarcity. The unique focus on FMCGs offers a novel perspective on consumer behavior literature.

This paper aims to highlight the role of the CEO’s background in the stock market reaction to a product recall. Based on the upper echelons theory and the crisis management literature, we argue that the CEO’s background influences the expected response in a product harm crisis and the updating of investors’ expectations following a product recall announcement. We test if the CEO’s background influences the abnormal stock market returns around product recalls and how it affects the way investors interpret the recall strategy and severity.

We use an event study, for a sample of 2,576 product recalls in the US automobile industry, between January 2010 and June 2021.

We observe that the stock market’s reaction is less negative if the firm’s CEO presents a core specialist background and for firms led by insider CEOs. This result is in line with our argument that in the presence of a crisis that requires operational and firm-specific knowledge, such as product recalls, the best alignment in terms of the CEO’s background occurs when the CEO was recruited inside and is a core specialist. Finally, we also find that the CEO’s background has a moderating effect on the impact of the recall strategy and severity on the stock market reaction to a recall announcement. In particular, a recall with high severity has a more negative stock market reaction when the CEO is a core specialist as such an event is not expected by the market.

These results have important implications for practitioners and scholars working in the areas of product quality and corporate governance. Given the high frequency and high costs for firms to carry out these operations in the automobile industry, we recommend a careful analysis of the CEO’s background before their appointment as well as careful planning to prevent and to adequately react appropriately to product quality problems. While there is a common tendency among executives to cut discretionary expenditures such as spending on product safety, our results regarding the stock market reaction to product recall announcements suggest that investors expect firms led by insider and core specialist CEOs to be more likely to ensure product quality and to respond to product quality crisis.

We extend knowledge of product recalls by studying the role of the CEO’s background on the stock market reaction to product recall announcements.

A total of 478 Americans participated in an online survey. Each participant was asked to answer questions about a company randomly assigned from one of 36 companies representing six industries.

This study aims to explain how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and negative corporate ability (CA) associations lead to negative word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions in non-crisis situations. Specifically, this study investigates the mediating roles of revenge and avoidance motives in the relationship between negative CSR and CA associations and the intention to generate negative WOM.

The findings indicate that negative CSR associations have a greater effect on WOM than negative CA associations. Moreover, negative CSR associations stimulate the revenge motive, resulting in stronger intentions to spread negative information, while negative CA associations lead to the avoidance motive, resulting in weaker intentions to spread negative information.

Unlike most previous studies that focused on crises, this study examines how negative CA and CSR associations influence negative WOM in non-crisis situations, shedding light on the roles of motives including the revenge and avoidance. The research fills a gap in the existing literature by demonstrating that negative CSR associations have a greater impact on negative WOM intentions than negative CA associations in non-crisis situations.

This paper has a dual purpose. The first is to provide a thorough analysis of developments in international marketing in relation to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic; the second is to capitalize on these developments to set an agenda for future research in the field of international marketing.

This paper zooms in on and reviews the 18 papers published in International Marketing Review’s (IMR) Special Issue on “Covid 19: advancing international marketing theory and guiding practice” (2023, volume 40, issue 5). It also integrates recent research at the intersection of international marketing and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper highlights five areas that embody significant contemporaneous changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and affect international marketing practice. These include (1) shifts in consumer behavior, (2) digitalization and artificial intelligence, (3) disruptions in supply chains, (4) communication and corporate social responsibility (CSR), and (5) international dynamic marketing capabilities. In order to advance international marketing theory in relation to pandemics and other external crises, the paper establishes research directions for each of these areas.

The paper provides a novel and comprehensive categorization of fundamental shifts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and lays out a research roadmap to advance research in the field of International Marketing (IM). Important implications for practice are also discussed.

With the evolution of the turbulent environment constantly triggering the emergence of a trust crisis between organizations, how can university–industry (U–I) alliances respond to the trust crisis when conducting green technology innovation (GTI) activities? This paper aims to address this issue.

The authors examined the process of trust crisis damage, including trust first suffering instantaneous impair as well as subsequently indirectly affecting GTI level, and ultimately hurting the profitability of green innovations. In this paper, a piecewise deterministic dynamic model is deployed to portray the trust and the GTI levels in GTI activities of U–I alliances.

The authors analyze the equilibrium results under decentralized and centralized decision-making modes to obtain the following conclusions: Trust levels are affected by a combination of hazard and damage (short and long term) rates, shifting from steady growth to decline in the presence of low hazard and damage rates. However, the GTI level has been growing steadily. It is essential to consider factors such as the hazard rate, the damage rate in the short and long terms, and the change in marginal profit in determining whether to pursue an efficiency- or recovery-friendly strategy in the face of a trust crisis. The authors found that two approaches can mitigate trust crisis losses: implementing a centralized decision-making mode (i.e. shared governance) and reducing pre-crisis trust-building investments. This study offers several insights for businesses and academics to respond to a trust crisis.

The present research can be extended in several directions. Instead of distinguishing attribution of trust crisis, the authors use hazard rate, short- and long-term damage rates and change in marginal profitability to distinguish the scale of trust crises. Future scholars can further add an attribution approach to enrich the classification of trust crises. Moreover, the authors only consider trust crises because of unexpected events in a turbulent environment; in fact, a trust crisis may also be a plateauing process, yet the authors do not study this situation.

First, the authors explore what factors affect the level of trust and the level of GTI when a trust crisis occurs. Second, the authors provide guidelines on how businesses and academics can coordinate their trust-building and GTI efforts when faced with a trust crisis in a turbulent environment.

First, the interaction between psychology and innovation management is explored in this paper. Although empirical studies have shown that trust in U–I alliances is related to innovation performance, and scholars have developed differential game models to portray the GTI process, building a differential game model to explore such an interaction is still scarce. Second, the authors incorporate inter-organizational trust level into the GTI level in university–industry collaboration, applying differential equations to portray the trust building and GTI processes, respectively, to reveal the importance of trust in CTI activities. Third, the authors establish a piecewise deterministic dynamic game model wherein the impact of crisis shocks is not equal to zero, which is inconsistent with most previous studies of Brownian motion.

The rising number of food recalls has raised concerns about complexity, globalization and weak governance in the food supply chain. This paper aims to investigate the recall of plant-based products with data from the US Food and Drug Administration.

Introducing the structural topic modeling method allowed us to test theories on recall in the context of sustainable food consumption, enhancing the understanding of food recall processes. This approach helps identify latent topics of product recalls and their interwoven relationships with various stakeholders.

The results answer a standing research call for empirical investigation in a nascent food industry to identify stakeholders’ engagements for food safety crisis management for corporate social responsibility practices. This finding provides novel insights on managing threats to food safety at an industry level to extend existing antecedents and consequences of product recall at a micro level.

For practitioners, this empirical finding may provide insights into stakeholder management and develop evidence-based strategies to prevent threats to food safety. For public policymakers, this analysis may help identify patterns of recalls and assist guidelines and alarm systems (e.g. EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) on threats in the food supply chain.

Two detected clusters, such as opportunisms of market actors in the plant-based food system and food culture, from the analysis help understand corporate social responsibility and food safety in the plant-based food industry.

This study explores whether the unique organizational form of family firms helps to mitigate the negative effects caused by the announcement of product recalls.

The authors use an event study, for a sample of 2,576 product recalls in the United States (US) automobile industry, between January 2010 and June 2021.

The authors found that stock market's reaction to a product recall announcement is less negative for family firms. This superior performance is partially driven by the family firms' long-term investment horizons and higher strategic emphasis on product quality. However, the relationship between family ownership and cumulative abnormal returns around product recall announcements is nonlinear as the impact of family ownership starts by being positive but becomes negative for higher levels of family ownership. The authors also find that family firm's chief executive officer (CEO) and managerial ownership influence positively the stock market reaction to product recall announcements.

This work has several implications for family firms' management as well as for investors and financial analysts. First, as higher managerial ownership is associated with a greater emphasis on product quality, decreasing stock market losses when a product recall occurs, family firms should consider increasing equity-based compensation. Second, as there seems to exist an optimal proportion of family ownership, family firms should consider the risks of increasing too much their ownership share. Third, investors and financial analysts can use the results in the study to help them in their investment and trading decisions in the stock market.

The authors extend the knowledge of product recalls by studying the under-researched role of the flexible, internally focused culture of family businesses on the stock market reaction to product recalls.

Although succession planning can be important for the continuity of family firms, not all family business have the opportunity to engage in this planning. Sometimes, these organizations face crisis events that may trigger an intra-family succession. However, what happens when there is an unplanned succession? Are family businesses doomed to fail? This project aims to explore unplanned successions that are triggered by crisis and the impact that this can have on post-succession financial performance. The authors also examine the moderating role of successor characteristics (i.e. education and previous work experience) on this relationship.

The ideas were tested using data from 151 publicly listed family firms in China.

The findings indicate that having a crisis driven intra-family succession does not always result in lower post-succession performance. It is only successions that are triggered by market crises that negatively impact financial performance after the unplanned succession. In these instances, the education and previous experience of the successor moderate the negative relationship between market crisis succession and financial performance such that having more experience and a college education diminishes these negative effects on performance.

The results point to the importance of the preparation of the next generation in helping family firms navigate unplanned successions. The findings indicate that education and previous work experience of the successor can help a family firm manage a crisis.

This study continues to build the understanding about unplanned successions and the important role that successor preparation can have for the success of the family firm.

Brand crisis has become an increasingly common phenomenon recently. While corporate social responsibility (CSR) plays a role in mitigating the negative consequences of brand crisis, it is not always effective, especially for foreign companies. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the differential effects of CSR on brand crisis, considering the impact of country of origin and consumer ethnocentrism.

This study used a 2 (country of origins: domestic vs foreign) × 2 (consumer ethnocentrism: high vs low) × 2 (CSR: before vs after related information is presented) between-subjects experiment to simulate a brand crisis. A fictional WeChat Moment posting was used as a stimulus. Data from 210 Chinese respondents were analyzed.

When consumer ethnocentrism is high, the impact of CSR on consumer attitude toward the company undergoing a crisis was greater for domestic than for foreign companies. Conversely, for consumers with low ethnocentrism, the effectiveness of CSR in attenuating the negative impact of the brand crisis (i.e. the insurance-like effect of CSR) was insignificant across domestic and foreign companies.

This study extends the prior literature and clarifies the unclear results of previous studies on the effect of CSR on brand crisis by examining the impact of country of origin and consumer ethnocentrism. Novel insights into the insurance-like effect of CSR in brand crises were obtained.

This study aims to explore the spillover effects of data breaches from a consumer perspective in the e-commerce context. Specifically, we investigate how an online retailer’s data breach affects consumers’ privacy risk perceptions of competing firms, and further how it affects shopping intention for the competitors. We also examine how the privacy risk contagion effect varies depending on the characteristics of competitors and their competitive responses.

We conducted two scenario-based experiments with surveys. To assess the spillover effects and the moderating effects, we employed an analysis of covariance. We also performed bootstrapping-based mediation analyses using the PROCESS macro.

We find evidence for the privacy risk contagion effect and demonstrate that it negatively influences consumers’ shopping intention for a competing firm. We also find that a competitor’s cybersecurity message is effective in avoiding the privacy risk contagion effect and the competitor even benefits from it.

While previous studies have examined the impacts of data breaches on customer perceptions of the breached firm, our study focuses on customer perceptions of the non-breached firms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to provide empirical evidence for the negative spillover effects of a data breach from a consumer perspective. More importantly, this study empirically demonstrates that the non-breached competitor’s competitive response is effective in preventing unintended negative spillover in the context of the data breach.