You cannot stay mad at this face...can you? : The relationship between message delivery, crisis responsibility and public responses to crisis.

This thesis investigates the relationship between the different message delivery styles (video message vs print message) of a corporate apology and the attributed corporate crisis responsibility in the context of corporate crisis. Public anger, negative impression, negative word-of-mouth, distrust and forgiveness serve as the dependent variables in this study. A 2x2 experimental design was used to investigate the mentioned relationship. Significant impact of crisis responsibility on the dependent variables has been confirmed. Neither impact of message delivery nor an interaction effect has been found.