The severity of negative events in enterprises affects consumers' brand attitude

With an increasing occurrence of negative events in enterprises, I explored how the severity level of negative events affects consumers’ brand attitude through the mediating variable of consumers’ perceived sense of betrayal and the moderating variable of brand attachment. I used an experimental method to collect data and performed independent samples t tests, two-way analyses of variance, and linear regressions to analyze surveys completed by 472 respondents. The results showed that the level of severity of a negative event had a significant influence on consumers’ brand attitude through the mediating variable of their perceived sense of betrayal. The more serious the negative event, the greater was the perceived sense of betrayal of the consumers and the more negative was their brand attitude. I further found that the level of consumers’ brand attachment had a moderating effect, in that, the greater the severity of a negative event, the stronger was the perception of betrayal by consumers with high brand attachment.