This research was conducted in order to examine the effect of brand status and brand crisis types on consumers’ forgiveness intention. In this research, we proposed and found that the favorable attitude toward the underdog referred as underdog effect (Paharia, Keinan, Avery, & Schor, 2011) would be diluted especially in relational-related failure. When relationship efforts and perceived warmth of the brand are particularly critical, service failure caused by highly identified underdog brand can be perceived to be more serious (Vandello, Goldschmied, & Richards, 2007). Four of the studies consistently demonstrated our assumption in that people expressed less forgiveness intention on underdog brands when the crisis is in a service failure (vs. product failure): study1 and 2, service process failure (vs. service outcome failure): study 3, and human service process failure (vs. non-human service process failure): 4. Further, the mechanism underlying this negative effect toward the underdog was revealed as perceived anger. These findings can give insights to marketers that the types of crisis and the way of brand positioning are very critical to influence customer’s forgiveness intention.

In this paper, we review the influence of crisis response strategies in social media on attitude recovery in relation to customer brand commitment. We extend the situational crisis communication theory and the social-mediated crisis communication model to include the role of audience characteristics (i.e., customer brand commitment). The effects of crisis response strategies (i.e., defensive, accommodative) and electronic word of mouth antecedents are discussed because source factors, message factors, and audience factors lead to attitude recovery. We also introduce a framework of the impacts of brand crisis response strategies on customer attitude recovery after exposure to negative word of mouth and response strategies in social media.

An empirical research on the Moncler case shows that brand loyalty moderates the consumer reactions to brand crises. While highly loyal consumers express sympathy toward the company, which predicts positive effects on brand attitude and purchase intention, lowly loyal consumers express anger, which predicts negative effects on the dependent variables.