Navigating Crises during Sexual Harassment Allegations A Quantitative Study Shedding Light on The Duality of Effects on Brand Attitudes, Purchase Intention, Message Credibility, and Brand Reputation during Crises

Understanding consumer behavior helps brands identify strategies to better increase purchases. However, crises can have detrimental impacts on consumer behavior, especially on brand attitudes, which in turn affect purchase behavior. Specifically, value-related crises, such as sexual harassment allegations can destroy strong consumer-brand relationships and trust. Value-related crises usually affect a consumer's morals, ethical principles, and values. Consumers often view sexual harassment as an issue of gendered power inequality, in which the situation involves a predator and a victim, with the predator in most cases being male and the victim female. Thus, the abuse of power negatively affects a consumer's attitudes towards a brand and therefore their intent to purchase. Crises are unforeseen events that can destroy a brand when not quickly and appropriately handled by the brand. By using the ICM Model, by Jin et al., (2007), which proposes a cognitive and organizational engagement approach, the various variables involved in this research are better understood. Thus, the model allows for understanding both how the proposed variables - brand attitude, purchase intention, brand reputation, message credibility, and gender - which can be understood through the cognitive lens of the consumer, further explore emotions, and the organizational engagement of a brand and its effects. The aim of this research is to examine the relationships between the effects of gender (of the participant) and purchase intention on brand attitude when mediated by message credibility and moderated by brand reputation. Insights were gathered through distributing a survey in multiple Facebook Groups, which allowed for distinct perspectives of individuals from various backgrounds and nationalities. The data was collected through a statistical software, SPSS. The statistical insights disclosed that regardless of the participant's gender, the more credible a message was perceived the better the attitudes towards the brand. Results revealed that gender had no significant effect on brand attitudes after a sexual harassment allegation. However, lower purchase intentions are correlated with lower brand attitudes. Moreover, the analyses show that when brand reputation was low, so were purchase intention and brand attitudes.