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Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word : The Effect Of Self-Attribution When Apologizing For A Brand Crisis, Denghua Yuan, Geng Cui, Lei Lai

Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies Working Paper Series

When apologizing for a product failure, self-attribution by a business inevitably affects consumer attitude and behavior. This study draws from the dissonance-attribution model and investigates the effect of self-attribution in apologies on consumers' brand attitude. Using a 2x2 experiment, the results show that internal attribution generates significant change in brand attitude in a positive direction, while external attribution leads to negative change in brand attitude. Dispositional attribution leads to significantly more positive brand attitude than situational attribution. Internal/dispositional attribution produces significantly more positive effect on consumer attitude than the other three types of attribution. Moreover, perceived risk is found to …