Negative Brand Events, Corporate Response Strategies, and Consumers' Reactions: Theoretical Roots, Past, Present, and Future
Keywords:
Bibliometric analysis, Consumer reaction, Corporate response strategy, Service failure, Service recovery, Negative brand events, NBEs, Literature review, Systematic reviewAbstract
While there have been several scattered studies on the relationship between corporate response strategy and negative brand events, limited academic efforts have been made to comprehend how the extant body of knowledge is constructed and diffused over time. Thereby, the current paper addresses this gap by using a bibliometric method through citation, co-citation, and co-occurrence to analyze how it has emerged, evolved, and how it will potentially advance. R-tool is applied to analyze bibliographic data. Following the PRISMA approach, journal articles are selected. The sample included 306 peer-reviewed articles across 134 journals published between 1986 and 2023 indexed in the Web of Science database. The findings significantly contribute to the field by depicting this domain's intellectual and conceptual structure and reporting what specific topics may gain popularity in future research. The results of co-citation analysis revealed two distinguishable streams, each showing different characteristics of this domain. Four dominant clusters are further identified based on the keywords using co-occurrence analysis. Our findings further reflected a substantial influence of psychological perspectives, communication theories, management, and public relations concepts and theories on this line of literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that synthesizes the academic work of various response strategies in different negative marketing events using bibliometric analysis. This review provides practical guidelines to marketers and businesses.
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