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How Does Brand Age Influence Consumer Attitudes Toward a Firm’s Unethical Behavior?

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Abstract

This paper identifies brand age as an important factor in consumers’ brand evaluations following unethical firm behavior. In two experiments, we assess the effect of brand age on three types of brand evaluations: perceived quality, brand credibility, and behavioral intentions following a brand crisis. The findings suggest that disclosing an older brand’s age can not only improve consumers’ brand evaluations in general, but can also provide a buffering effect when the firm is involved in unethical behavior. Moreover, the relationship between brand age and consumers’ post-crisis intentions is mediated by perceived brand credibility. By exploring consumers’ attitudes following the most common firm response strategies, this research also identifies a boundary condition of the mitigating effect of brand age. Several significant implications for practitioners are discussed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, University of Indianapolis, 1400 East Hanna Avenue, Indianapolis, IN, 46227, USA

    Chi Zhang

  2. School of Business, The University of Mississippi, Holman 336, University, MS, 38677, USA

    Saim Kashmiri

  3. School of Business, The University of Mississippi, Holman 364, University, MS, 38677, USA

    Melissa Cinelli

Authors
  1. Chi Zhang
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  2. Saim Kashmiri
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  3. Melissa Cinelli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chi Zhang.

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Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

See Figs. 1, 2, and 3.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Brand age (old brand vs. young brand)

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Firm unethical behavior (advertising fraud vs. food safety issue)

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Fig. 3
figure 3

Firm responses (unambiguous support vs. stonewalling vs. ambiguous responses)

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Zhang, C., Kashmiri, S. & Cinelli, M. How Does Brand Age Influence Consumer Attitudes Toward a Firm’s Unethical Behavior?. J Bus Ethics 158, 699–711 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3696-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3696-y

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