Brand Crisis Communication and Consumer Brand Engagement on Social Media: The Case of Frontline Employee Generated Crisis

Social media enables brands to communicate instantly with consumers and drive user engagement. However, consumers’ brand engagement on social media is not always positive, especially in the presence of a crisis. Consumer brand engagement becomes more complicated given consumers’ empowerment through social media and the brands’ multiple stakeholders that shape brands’ value. The purpose of this research is to explore consumers’ multi-valenced online comments to a brand crisis communication initiated by front-line employees’ misbehavior to a group of consumers in the retail environment. Data was collected from the brand crisis communication that was shared on the official Instagram account of the brand. Focusing on real time Instagram data from consumers that reside in a collectivistic culture, a typology was developed to classify the hybrid and multi-valenced forms of consumer brand engagement. The study contributes to the consumer brand engagement and brand crisis communication literatures.