Organizational Crisis and Bolstering: Underrated Strategy or Puffery? An experiment into the effect of the Bolstering strategy in mitigating negative reputation fallout during initial crisis communications responses on social media.

The use of the bolstering strategy was identified by Kim et al. (2009) as the most prevalent crisis response strategy amongst practitioners. This is in contrast with what the Situational Crisis Communication Theory states: that bolstering is a minimal effect strategy only to be used in certain situations. This study used an online experiment (N=146) to determine how effective the incorporation of bolstering is in combination with the denial or corrective action initial crisis response strategies for a company of good prior reputation facing a preventable crisis. Four different crisis response strategies (with/ without bolstering X denial/ corrective action) were tested following a fictional article accusing Sony of negligence, resulting in dangerous product malfunction. Conditions were presented randomly to our respondents. Our crisis responses were framed as Facebook posts, as social media has evolved to an important initial crisis communication tool. Bolstering was found to have little effect on the three factors crisis communication attempts to minimize the negative effects on: Post-Crisis Reputation (reputation held after the crisis), Secondary Crisis Communication (intention to spread the crisis) & Secondary Crisis Reactions (negative word-ofmouth and purchase intentions). Response strategy (denial/ corrective action) was also found to have little effect on these factors. We found that the biggest asset in minimizing negative reputational fallout is Pre-Crisis Reputation, as is confirmed in existing theory. Our results indicate the most important aspect of initial crisis management is the reputation held by the company before the crisis and that a positive pre-crisis reputation helps ‘shield’ the organization from negative crisis fallout on all three of our factors.