What happens to customers when a crisis hits the core dimension of corporate reputation? The role of the perception of congruence versus incongruence

Nowadays, initiatives of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are fundamental to build reputation and corporate reputation plays an important role in determining the impact of crises on firms. Reputation is a comprehensive construct, but customers may perceive a company as particularly strong on a specific CSR dimension. Through an experimental study, we show that the congruence between that salient dimension of corporate reputation and the dimension affected by a crisis influences customer behavior. Negativity effect, diagnosticity of information, and dissonance theory help explain the different effects of a congruent vs. incongruent crisis scenario. We found that in case of congruence (i.e., the crisis hits a dimension that is not the core of the company reputation) the customers’ attitude toward the company, word-of-mouth, and purchase intention are better than in the case of incongruence (i.e., the crisis strikes the company’s main reputational asset).