Sustainability & crisis management

: a valuable link to regain consumer trust and purchase intention : a case on Audi AG

Abstract

Throughout the past years, companies have increasingly faced performance-related crises dueto rising complexity of customer needs and external requirements. In light of these issues,existing academic research has investigated the effectiveness of Corporate SocialResponsibility (CSR) in countering firm’s negative publicity. Yet, consumers tend to expresstheir scepticism towards organisational CSR efforts and accuse firms of green-washing.Conversely to CSR, corporate sustainability initiatives are less likely to be perceived as greenwashing,as they necessitate long-term investments and irreversible changes of businessprocesses. Hence, the aim of the present thesis is to examine the effectiveness of corporatesustainability in countering negative publicity. More specifically, this paper evaluates whetherAudi’s sustainability strategy enables the firm to regain consumer trust and increase purchaseintention after the Diesel Emission Issue. Therefore, based on theoretical and practicalconsiderations, an online experimental study was conducted. Results show that presentingindividuals with information on firms’ initiatives associated with “Employees & Society” aswell as “Operations & Integrity” increase consumer trust levels. Moreover, Audi’ssustainability strategy results in significantly higher levels of purchase intention. Hence, thepresent dissertation contributes preliminarily research findings to a yet very limited stream ofresearch and holds important practical implications, especially for Audi AG, in terms of howsustainability efforts can be effectively implemented as part of the crisis communicationstrategy.

Date of Award	28 Jul 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Bianca Soraya Soares Vilhena de Mendonça (Supervisor)