Community Blame Behavior and Product Evaluation When a Product Harm Crisis Occurs

Abstract

This study aims to examine the process of product-harm crisis incidents that occurred in Indonesia around March 2018, which is about the behavior of the community blame on canned sardines. There are several variables observed, indicating that blame is a negative evaluation of the community, and this is due to the sentiment toward China as the country-of-origin of the brand and the brand's negative image. In this study, observations of the product evaluation process were carried out in the high-forgiveness and low-forgiveness groups. This is done to find out whether forgiveness given by someone can significantly influence the product evaluation results. In this study, the factors observed in the product evaluation process are the sentiment of the country-of-origin and the negative image. Both factors are mediated by blame behavior to obtain the product evaluation results. An online survey was conducted on 255 people in the Surakarta-Indonesian community. Then, the data was analyzed with a multi-group of Structural Equation Modeling with the IBM SPSS AMOS 26 program. The study results indicate that negative evaluation and blame behavior are significantly related to country-of-origin sentiment and negative brand image. Furthermore, it was found that forgiveness is a variable that can moderate the process of forming negative evaluation and blame behavior. In addition, this study explains the implications associated with theoretical and practical interests and the possibilities for further research.