The Impact of Time on Product-Harm Crises:

The Case of IKEA’s Meatballs

Dr. Aikaterini Vassilikopoulou

Peter J Stavroulakis

1st WSEAS International Conference on COMPUTER SUPPORTED EDUCATION

CRISIS: A DISRUPTION THAT AFFECTS THE ENTIRE CORPORATE SYSTEM AND THREATENS ITS BASIC

PRINCIPLES

Pauchant & Mitroff, 1992

Product-harm crises areincidents where a product isfound to be unsafe forconsumers, defective ordangerous.

Dawar & Pillutla, 2001

Brand Crises Typology:

o Performance-relatedo Values-related

Dutta & Pullig, 2011

•Denial to Super-Effort (Shrivastava and Siomkos , 1989)

•Three Basic Accommodative Strategies (Coombs, 2007)

The Organizations’ Response to a Crisis May Significantly Affect

Consumers’ Attitudes, Perceptions and Reactions

The impact of time on product-harm crises

Literature is limited

Time span may be critical (Standop, 2006)

Consumers seem to forget (Vassilikopoulou, 2009)

Limitations: Research was based on hypotheticalscenarios and a great deal of time had passedbetween the crisis and the research

IKEA Meatball Crisis Timeline

Feb 25th 2013, traces of horsemeat are found in samples of IKEA’s meatballs in the Czech Republic and the information goes public, IKEA recalls meatballs from 14 EU countries

7 weeks afterwards the meatballs are back on the shelves with a discounted retail price

Methodology

Three days after the crisis goes public

124 respondents given a questionnaire

41% men

56% college graduates

30% were 18-25 years old

Questionnaire

I have a good impression about IKEA

How would you characterize the decision of whether to buy meatballs from IKEA’s restaurant?

I hold IKEA responsible for the product harm

I feel angry about the event

How severe was the event

I intend to buy meatballs from IKEA’s restaurant in the future

I intend to buy furniture from IKEA in the future

All items were formulated in 7-point Likert-type scale format.

Results

Mean ScoresItem 3 days after 1 week

after2 weeksafter

4 weeksafter

6 weeksafter

Impression 3.45 4.67 4.66 4.89 5.01

Perceived risk 4.91 4.20 4.13 3.87 3.65Item 3 days after 1 week

after2 weeksafter

4 weeksafter

6 weeksafter

Anger 5.09 4.32 4.22 3.75 3.73

Severity 4.88 4.52 4.44 4.29 3.95

Purchaseintentions(meatballs)

2.54 3.68 4.16 4.54 4.69

Purchaseintentions

(furniture)

5.89 6.02 6.07 6.12 6.20

Impression and Perceived Risk

Blame, Anger and Severity

Purchase Intentions

Conclusions

While it may take people years to forgetnegative experiences deriving from a crisisand for them to form more positiveperceptions (Kanso, Levitt and Nelson, 2010),

it would seem that the crisis has beenmitigated

Time is an altering factor

Future Directions

Model of estimating the temporal impact of a crisis utilizing growth curves

Thank you for your attention!