The Balenciaga Controversy

A consistent number of organizational crises occurred in recent decades, attracting major negative attention toward the incriminated companies. Due to the increased frequency of unexpected events impacting corporations, the field of crisis communication has become increasingly crucial to research. Crises generally produce negative outcomes, threatening a company’s reputation as well as stakeholders’ perceptions and expectations. In this study, the controversy of the luxury fashion house of Balenciaga related to child abuse and pedophilia accusations was investigated. Since previous studies tended to overlook stakeholders’ perceptions of negative events, there is a greater need in the field to investigate consumers’ perceptions of crisis. For this reason, the focus of this research is to analyze how the crisis may alter consumers’ satisfaction with Balenciaga, based on their perception of three factors, crisis responsibility, crisis involvement, and pre-crisis reputation, while considering the possible moderation effect of familiarity with the brand. This research is grounded on the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) which also introduces two of the three factors object of the study. Furthermore, the research met the call for adding crisis involvement to SCCT dynamics and the possible moderation effect of individual-related brand familiarity. Finally, the effect is tested on consumer satisfaction which is a variable rarely investigated in a crisis context. Using a quantitative methodology, an online survey was distributed to research whether the three proposed factors have an impact on consumer satisfaction. The survey was realized using the online platform Qualtrics and then the outcomes were analysed through the software SPSS statistics. The results confirmed the previous study’s findings about responsibility and prior reputation. Crisis responsibility, in particular, has a significant negative impact on the dependent variable, as does pre-crisis reputation, which is positively correlated with consumer satisfaction. Additionally, no significant impact was found between crisis involvement and consumer satisfaction. Although 62.2% of respondents declared to be familiar with the brand, the study’s results reject the moderating effect of brand familiarity on the correlations between all three independent variables and consumer satisfaction. More extended research should be conducted to further develop the field by investigating the interaction of new potential dependent and independent variables such as purchase intention and post-crisis reputation.