• ISSN: 2382-6282 (Print); 2972-3108 (Online)
    • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
    • Frequency: Bimonthly
    • DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
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HOME > Archives > 2024 > Volume 10 Number 6 (2024) >
IJLLL 2024 Vol.10(6): 449-457
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.6.559

Trust-repair Strategies in Corporate Crisis Public Relations Apology Statements

Shengyi Chen
School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, P.R. China
Email: ethanmm0527@gmail.com (S.Y.C.)

Manuscript received September 4, 2024; revised September 30, 2024; accepted October 25, 2024; published November 25, 2024.

Abstract—Trust is vulnerable. For business organizations, releasing corporate Public Relations (PR) statements is the primary method to restore their trustworthiness once adverse events occur. This paper explores the apology strategies employed in Chinese official corporate PR statements from Weibo, one of the biggest social media platform in China. Totally 18 statements from eight different organizations, with 8255 Chinese characters, were selected. By combining Bataineh’s and Sugimoto’s apology strategies, the paper proposes six types of apology strategies that are more responsive to the specificities of Chinese corporate apology statements: describing event, assessing responsibility, offering redress, making promises, expressing integrity, and motivating emotion. Then, by integrating these strategies into causal attribution model, this paper aims to investigate the feasibility of these strategies and their effectiveness. The results show that all six strategies were adopted in the statements, which contribute to the causal ascription in both superficial and deep level, thereby trying to achieve trustworthiness.

Keywords—apology strategies, trust repair, corporate public relations, social media, e-commerce context

Cite: Shengyi Chen, "Trust-repair Strategies in Corporate Crisis Public Relations Apology Statements," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 449-457, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

 
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