How to repair public trust effectively: Research on enterprise online public opinion crisis response

Abstract With the rapid development of social media, the new challenge comes out: how to cope with online public opinion crisis in enterprise. Our study solves the problem from the perspective of how to repair public trust effectively. To be specific, we construct a unique data set about 5 quality defect cases including 13 response announcements and 46,896 online comments. Combining text mining with empirical testing, we measure the effectiveness of different trust repair strategies in different crisis stages, and explore the effect mechanism and optimal combination of trust repair strategy. Our results show that the affective repair strategy is most effective in the acute stage, the informational repair strategy is most effective in the chronic stage, and the functional repair strategy is most effective in the termination stage. Our work contributes important insights to the online public opinion crisis and trust repair literature, and provides management implications for enterprises to repair public trust effectively in online public opinion crises.