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1. Introduction
As an ancient Chinese saying goes, “A gentleman should start carefully” (Da Dai Li Ji – Li Cha), emphasizing the importance of the beginning of things. In real life, both individuals and companies can hardly avoid troughs and difficulties in the process of growth and development, so they need to start again and again (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014; Sugarman, 2015). Fresh start mindset (FSM) is a conceptual metaphor that reflects the ability to make a fresh start for oneself or others (Ayers et al., 2014; Price et al., 2018), and errant brands in crisis need to make a fresh start to repair their relationships with consumers. However, just as the relationship between the offended and offender is an interpersonal one, where the offended person may believe that the offender is a prodigal son or a tiger cannot change its stripes, so too may the consumer’s perception of the brand in crisis. Given the connotation of others can start over in FSM, this study seeks to address the following question by exploring the mechanisms underlying the formation of consumer forgiveness in brand crisis:
After a brand crisis, when do consumers believe that the errant brand will rise from the ashes and when will it repeat the past?
Why does this difference exist?
What crisis response strategies do companies use to increase consumer forgiveness?
Much of existing research has examined the self-focused FSM such as individual goal achievement, self-improvement of product preferences and advertising evaluations (Crockett et al., 2013; Dai et al., 2014; Price et al., 2018). In contrast, missing has been a consideration of other-focused FSM, which is limited to the impact of FSM on the relationship between individuals. There is a gap in the examination of people–object interaction (e.g. consumers and brands). This paper will first extend the FSM to brand crisis management to enrich and expand the existing theoretical and empirical research. Given this, this paper intends to focus on the brand crisis and try to explore and solve the following problems: first, to examine the interaction effect of FSM and brand crisis type on consumer forgiveness; second, to reveal the psychological mechanism of this effect; and third, to clarify the possible boundary conditions...