At the crossroads of inclusion and distance: Organizational crisis communication during celebrity-endorsement crises in China

•Celebrity-endorsement crisis is internally attributed and perceived as controllable.•Integrity-violated crisis leads to more negative primary online reaction.•Inclusion strategies find better secondary online reaction than distancing.•Poster's crisis attribution is more influential on secondary online response.•Perceived external, controllable and integrity-violated crises generate more “like”.

Celebrity endorsements, though popular as a means of communicating about products, carry high risks and may lead to negative consequences for the organizations that solicit them, especially when endorsers find themselves embroiled in scandals or crises unrelated to the products they promote. This study investigates how Liu Xiang's withdrawal from the 2012 London Olympics and Sun Yang's unlicensed driving crisis affected their sponsorships of Nike and Beijing Hyundai, respectively. Attribution theory and the concept of in-group/out-group orientation provide a framework for examining both primary and secondary public reactions to these public relations crises on Sina Weibo. As a comparative study, this paper adopts both qualitative (thematic analysis of two official announcements) and quantitative methods (content analysis of 738 Weibo postings). Within a Chinese cultural context, evidence indicates that celebrity-endorsement crises are internally attributed and perceived to be controllable. Where primary public attitudes are concerned, integrity violations lead to more negative reactions; however, inclusion strategies find a better reception than distancing, regardless of the public's crisis-responsibility attributions. For secondary online reactions, Weibo posters’ perceptions of external locus, controllability, and integrity violations generate more “likes” than organizational strategies, thereby proving themselves more influential online. This study ultimately provides a more comprehensive refinement of attribution theory by both conceptualizing crisis-response strategies with a discussion of Chinese cultural sensitivities and offering empirical data on the ways in which primary and secondary crisis communication affects stakeholders via social media.