This study examines how corporate responses to service failure, caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, influence electronic-word-of-mouth (E-WoM) and trust recovery around lockdown, using multiple data sources. A dataset of 398 valid COVID-19 announcements from 50 UK food retailers posted on the social media platform Twitter, and 21,960 consumer comments associated with these announcements, are analysed using content analysis and social media analytics, respectively. In Study 1, we test the effects of corporate crisis response strategy (defensive vs. offensive) and response framing (emotional vs. rational) on consumer E-WoM (measured as ‘consumer sentiment’). The results reveal that using a defensive corporate response strategy with emotionally framed announcements leads to more positive consumer E-WoM. In Study 2, we advance the findings of Study 1 using a vignette-based experimental design to examine how social media announcements made by food retailing brands influence consumers’ trust recovery. We find that consumer trust recovers significantly when corporate COVID-19 responses are framed in an emotional manner. By drawing upon signalling theory, this study makes an important contribution to public health crisis communication and service failure literature by demystifying consumers’ reactions towards corporate crisis responses amid a pandemic.

中文翻译：

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企业应对冠状病毒危机及其对电子口碑和信任恢复的影响：来自社交媒体的证据

本研究使用多个数据源，研究了企业对由冠状病毒 (COVID-19) 危机引起的服务故障的反应如何影响电子口碑 (E-WoM) 和围绕锁定的信任恢复。分别使用内容分析和社交媒体分析对社交媒体平台 Twitter 上发布的 50 家英国食品零售商的 398 条有效 COVID-19 公告以及与这些公告相关的 21,960 条消费者评论的数据集进行了分析。在研究 1 中，我们测试了企业危机应对策略（防御与进攻）和响应框架（情绪与理性）对消费者 E-WoM（以“消费者情绪”衡量）的影响。结果表明，使用带有情感框架的公告的防御性企业响应策略会导致更积极的消费者 E-WoM。在研究 2 中，我们使用基于小插图的实验设计来推进研究 1 的结果，以检查食品零售品牌发布的社交媒体公告如何影响消费者的信任恢复。我们发现，当企业 COVID-19 响应以情绪化的方式构建时，消费者信任度会显着恢复。通过利用信号理论，本研究通过揭开消费者对大流行期间企业危机应对措施的反应的神秘面纱，为公共卫生危机传播和服务失败文献做出了重要贡献。