Influencer-Owned Brands Under Pressure - An Evaluation of the Rebuild Strategy in Situational Crisis Communication Theory in Influencer-Owned Brands

Sammanfattning

This study examines how crisis communication strategies function in the context of influencer-owned brands, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) rebuild strategy. A qualitative pre-study, deep diving into the Matilda Djerf case, explored how consumers evaluate crisis responses in influencer-owned brand settings. The findings suggest that consumers assess such crises through a lens shaped by human brand perception and moral judgement, both of which are tied to perceptions of authenticity. Building on these insights, a quantitative between-subjects survey experiment was conducted in which participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a corporate brand offering either a sincere or neutral apology, or an influencer-owned brand offering either a sincere or neutral apology. The results indicate that sincere apologies, consistent with SCCT rebuild strategies, generate more positive evaluations in traditional corporate contexts, particularly in terms of perceived apology effectiveness. Furthermore, perceived authenticity, operationalised in this study through credibility and integrity, mediates the relationship between apology type and both apology effectiveness and opinion improvement for traditional firms. However, these mediating effects were not observed in influencer-owned brand contexts, where sincere apologies did not significantly outperform neutral responses. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of SCCT rebuild strategies depends on organisational context and that influencer-owned brands may represent a boundary condition to SCCT's applicability. The study contributes to crisis communication research by extending SCCT into influencer-driven organisational settings and highlights the need to adapt existing crisis communication frameworks to contexts where personal and organisational identities are closely intertwined.