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Global product-harm crises increased in recent years. After such crises, firms' product-recall policies varied across countries, which might cause consumers in some countries to feel unfairly treated. Drawing on the relative deprivation theory, this study aims to examine how perceived unfairness of local consumers alters their attitudes toward unfairness-enacting foreign brands and competing domestic brands.

This framework was tested by a netnography study on two product recalls from Samsung along with a consumer survey. While this netnography study provided preliminary support to the framework, survey data collected from 501 Samsung consumers after the Galaxy Note 7 crisis validated the theoretical model again.

Perceived unfairness increases local consumers' avoidance of involved foreign brands and their intention to purchase domestic brands through evoking anger toward the foreign brands. Moreover, the detrimental impact of perceived unfairness is found to be stronger when consumers' prior relationship quality is high.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates unfair product recalls across countries and aims to provide important insights into how consumers react to the unfair treatment of foreign brands in a global product-harm context. This study contributes to the product-harm crisis literature and provides important implications for global product-harm crisis management strategies.

This study aims to propose a model that delineated the diffusion process of product-harm misinformation on social media. Drawing on theoretical insights from cue diagnosticity and corporate associations, the proposed model mapped out how consumers' information skepticism and perceived content credibility influence their perceived diagnosticity of the product-harm misinformation and corporate ability (CA) associations with the company being impacted, which in turn influenced their trust toward the company and negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) intention.

A survey was conducted with 504 US consumers to empirically test the proposed model. Following the survey, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 communication professionals regarding the applicability of the model.

When exposed to product-harm misinformation on social media, consumers' perceived diagnosticity of misinformation was negatively impacted by their information skepticism and positively impacted by perceived content credibility of misinformation. Perceived diagnosticity of product-harm misinformation negatively impacted consumers' CA associations, which then led to decreased trust and increased NWOM intention. Findings from the interviews further supported the diffusion process and provided insights on strategies to combat product-harm misinformation. Strategies shared by the interviewees included preparedness and social listening, proactive outreach and building strong CA associations as preventative measures.

This study incorporates the theoretical frameworks of cue diagnosticity and corporate associations into the scholarship of misinformation and specifically addresses the unique diffusion process of product-harm misinformation on social media. This study provides insights and tangible recommendations for communication professionals to combat product-harm misinformation.

As the current Coronavirus 2019 pandemic eases, international tourism, which was greatly affected by the outbreak, is gradually recovering. The attraction of countries to overseas tourists is related to their overall performance in the pandemic. This research integrates the data of vaccination of different countries, border control policy and holidays to explore their differential impacts on the overseas tourists’ intention during the pandemic. This is crucial for destinations to built their tourism resilience. It will also help countries and industry organizations to promote their own destinations to foreign tourism enterprises.

This study proposes an analysis based on panel data for ten countries over 1,388 days. The coefficient of variation is used to measure monthly differences of Chinese tourists’ intention to visit overseas country destinations.

Results show that, for tourist intention of going abroad: border control of the destination country has a significant negative impact; daily new cases in the destination country have a significant negative impact; domestic daily new cases have a significant positive impact; holidays have significant negative impact; daily vaccination of the destination countries has significant positive impact; and domestic daily vaccination have negative significant impact.

First, there is a large uncertainty in studying consumers’ willingness to travel abroad in this particular period because of unnecessary travel abroad caused by the control of the epidemic. Second, there are limitations in studying only Chinese tourists, and future research should be geared toward a broader range of research pairs.

First, from the government perspective, a humane response can earn the respect and trust of tourists. Second, for tourism industry, to encourage the public take vaccine would be beneficial for both the tourism destination and foreign tourism companies. The same effect can be achieved by helping tourists who are troubled by border control.

First, this research provides suggestions for the government and the tourism industry to deal with such a crisis in the future. Second, this study found that vaccination has a direct impact on tourism. This provides a basis for improving people’s willingness to vaccinate. Thirdly, this study proves suggestion for the destinations to build tourism resilience.

This study analyzes the unique control measures and vaccination in different countries during the pandemic, then provides suggestions for the tourism industry to prepare for the upcoming postpandemic tourism recovery. This study is valuable for improving the economic resilience of tourism destinations. Additionally, it helps to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of different restrain policies around the world.

During a brand crisis, consumers construct attributions to understand the cause of the crisis and to assign blame, with attributions of blame to firms consequently lowering brand attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to explore attributions of blame in performance- versus values-related brand crisis. Do consumers assign different levels of blame to values- versus performance-related brand crises?

The authors conducted three experimental studies, plus one pilot study, with American, British and Australian participants in which they manipulated the type of brand crisis as values- or performance-related to determine the extent to which consumers attribute blame to the firm and the effects of those attributions on consumers’ brand attitudes.

Findings indicated that consumers assign more blame to firms for a values-related brand crisis than for a performance-related brand crisis.

The findings of this study explain how consumers are harsher towards firms that violate some moral or social standards than those that exhibit product defects.

For branding and public relations officials, finding greater internal attribution for values-related brand crises offers implications for how and what information about such crises ought to be conveyed to manage consumer response and brand reputation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the findings are the first to explore attributions in blame toward values- and performance-related brand crises.

This chapter examines the key issues around organisational resilience – what it means for organisations, and the key elements they need to consider if they are looking to increase the ability of their operations to withstand challenges in their environment. Organisations have always had to adapt to changes in their environment, whether as a result of market-based, political, regulatory or technological developments. However, the pace of change and the number and frequency of external shocks, such as the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 epidemic, war and increasing nationalism, inflation, labour shortages, cyber-security threats and environmental crises have increased over recent years. Whilst some of these events could have been foreseen, in that they emerge relatively slowly, such as increasing nationalism, other crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic could not have been readily anticipated, both for the speed at which it occurred, but the significant impact it had on people and organisations. Clearly, many of these events can have severe consequences not only for society but also for organisations, potentially threatening their survival. Hence organisations are increasingly recognising the need to be both more aware of potential threats or even opportunities by constantly monitoring their environment, but also creating contingency or mitigation plans to become more resilient to such change and shocks. By becoming more aware of changes in their environment and incorporating risk evaluations and mitigation plans into strategy and regular business planning cycles, organisations can become more adaptive and agile to respond more quickly and robustly to such events. Whilst it is not possible to fully mitigate all risks to the organisation, increased resilience can reduce the severity or longevity of negative impacts or support the organisation to seek opportunities from change.

This chapter introduces the concept of overall organisational resilience, and then discusses some more functional areas of resilience: operational, financial, technological, reputational and institutional. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the effects of building greater organisational resilience and what organisations should consider when evaluating where to start on such a journey.

The brand crisis literature remains unilateral and scattered, necessitating academic effort to comprehend the extant body of knowledge. This study aims to provide the required comprehensive overview of the domain, by outlining its significance, progression and future research directions.

Following the PRISMA approach, journal articles for review are selected. The study uses a hybrid (structured and bibliometric) review, to provide a systematic insight and graphical visualization of the existing literature. It applies VOSviewer software to analyse bibliographic data through citation and co-occurrence analysis.

The hybrid review outlines most-cited articles, authors, frequently used theories, methodologies and data analysis techniques in this domain. Findings are further presented as integrative framework that distinctly highlights prior studies from a dichotomous perspective and across three stages of crisis. Finally, research opportunities and directions for future research are presented.

The study is useful for scholars and practitioners to understand the brand crisis literature and to cognize the inferences drawn by distinct researchers. It provides contemporary research agendas using the theory, context and method (TCM) framework, to augment future investigations through interdisciplinary approach.

To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that synthesizes the academic work of brand crisis using a hybrid method. Also, the novelty of the work lies in presenting the future research direction in the form of multiple (macro, meso and micro) levels with inter-disciplinary theoretical underpinnings.

Merely being known as a highly ethical or strong performer cannot shield a company from every kind of crisis. From product failures to environmental and social issues, a brand’s ability to manage crises and rapidly regain consumer trust is essential. This study aims to explore whether consumer perceptions of a brands’ prior commitments to two different areas of corporate responsibility (social and product responsibility) alleviate the postcrisis attribution of accountability and further build brand resilience, examining differences between two types of crisis situations – values versus performance crises.

A scenario-based online survey on product versus ethical labor issues was conducted. The data were collected from a highly valid, nationwide sample set of more than a thousand US consumers. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used as the primary data analysis method.

A brand’s precrisis commitment to social responsibility was found to decrease attribution of accountability across both types of crises. It also strengthened brand resilience, but this effect was more prevalent in a performance than a values crisis. The effects of precrisis commitment to product responsibility on brand resilience were minimal or insignificant across crisis types.

Previous research underexplores which types of corporate responsibility commitments provide a firm with a better protection against crises. This study significantly advances the knowledge regarding the type of commitments that can substantially increase brand resilience, which supports the rationale of making stronger commitments to social responsibility than to product responsibility. Practical insights are provided into how investments in corporate social responsibility help alleviate consumers’ negative perceptions during the outbreak of a brand crisis and build more brand muscle that enables resilience against future crises.

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.

The research empirically examines the role of artificial intelligence (AI) integrated with social customer relationship management (SCRM) in multinational enterprises (MNEs) towards international relationship management under social distancing conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study initially undertakes pertinently focused theoretical research in the fields of international marketing, knowledge management, and customer relationship management. And, utilizing the theories of resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capability view (DCV) theory, the study develops a theoretical model that is subsequently empirically validated through a survey and structural equation modeling.

The study highlights the importance and means of adopting AI-integrated social CRM by MNEs, in the context of international relationship management, under the Covid-19 social distancing conditions. The study more specifically elucidates the role and significance of MNE leadership approach and support towards the adoption of AI-integrated social CRM systems and, ultimately, performance improvement of MNEs under such conditions.

The study presents insights and prescriptive explications on a topic at the heart of state-of the-art technology-based international marketing in the explicit context of the primary business-defining environment of the Covid-19 pandemic. The research provides practicable suggestions to MNEs' leadership towards the adoption of an AI-integrated social CRM system. And the study presents a unique model for international relationship management under social distancing conditions, potentially applicable during other crises.

The research is original and on a ‘fresh’ topic that combines the latest technological advancements in business (AI-integrated CRM) with the present critical business context (pandemic). The research develops a tested theoretical model that (a) is unique in its field; (b) provides a solid foundation for further research; (c) bears generic value and application during other-than-Covid-19 conditions; and (d) enhances the understanding of important fields of international marketing, including international customer relationship management and global knowledge management.