Building organizational resilience as responses to brand crisis spillovers

Brands not only encounter internal crises but also are impacted by crises happening to other brands, i.e., the spillover effect of a brand crisis. Existing research has explored how a focal-brand crisis negatively affects other (non-focal) brands, and how non-focal brands react to it with the crisis- management approach. However, little attention has been paid to other natures of the spillover effects and non-focal brands’ responses with long-term orientation. Based on the literature of brand crisis and its spillover effects, and organizational resilience, this study adopts a dynamic and processual perspective by undertaking a multiple-case study designed, to investigate the how non- focal brands build organizational resilience to respond to the focal-brand crisis’s spillover effects. The research findings provide two major contributions. First, we develop theories of the multi-dimensional and dynamic natures of the brand crisis spillover effects by proposing a two-by-two matrix, indicating the spillover effects could be both negative and positive, with immediate vs. emerging effects. Second, we identified three key capabilities activated or built for building organizational resilience, i.e., anticipation capability, coping capability, and adaptation capability. Futhermore, coping capability is activated or built with short-term purpose and adaptation capability is built with long-term orientation.