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Introduction
Food safety is a growing area of public concern, particularly in China. The 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal is well known for causing the nation’s largest food safety crisis (Mo et al., 2012), where 290,000 consumers around the world were affected, more than 50,000 children hospitalized and six babies died (Morehouse Freienstein and Cardoso, 2010). This crisis posed a severe threat to public trust in milk products originating in China. Many Chinese consumers switched to international brands, which were regarded as safer but at much higher prices. China’s oldest and biggest producer of milk powder, Sanlu Group, went bankrupt as a result of the crisis (Court declares bankruptcy of Sanlu Group, 2008). Other milk product companies struggled to promote their products among the suspecting Chinese public. After the crisis, foreign milk producers seized nearly 80 percent of the Chinese formula market (Zhang, 2012).
This study examined the strategies Chinese milk companies employed in handling this fatal crisis. In a typical crisis situation in the West, a designated crisis management team represents the company or organization involved in the crisis and communicates to its customers and shareholders, among other parties, using a series of crisis management strategies. Many of these strategies have been tested and proven effective in different crises (e.g. Howell and Miller, 2010; Meng, 2010; Weber et al., 2011). However, Western crisis management strategies have not been well received in China. As a matter of fact, many Chinese top managers still believe that Western crisis management theories are useless for Chinese organizations (Liu et al., 2009). Not surprisingly, research on crisis management remains scarce in the Chinese setting. Most Chinese crisis studies focus on media coverage and government responses (e.g. Chen, 2012; Liu et al., 2011; Yang, 2012). The only study that examined crisis management strategies from the perspective of involved companies was a qualitative examination of crisis management from Sanlu Group, which went bankrupt during the 2008 Milk Scandal (Ye and Pang, 2011).
This study sought to fill the vacancy in research by investigating the crisis communication strategies by four major Chinese milk companies, Sanlu, Mengniu, Yili and the Bright Group, during and after the milk scandal. Using the framework of the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) (Coombs, 2007)...