ABSTRACT This article examines user engagement and interaction during an online brand crisis, focusing on the polarized reactions to Scandinavian Airlines’ (SAS) controversial 2020 advertisement “What is Truly Scandinavian?” Drawing on online brand crisis research and customer brand engagement theory, the study analyses the deductively derived categories of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses of Facebook users to the advertisement and its revised versions. A quantitative content analysis of 2,160 user comments identifies four distinct user response group – fans, friends, opponents, and hate-holders – revealing not only stark divisions but also varying levels of engagement and response dynamics. The findings challenge the conventional “love-hate” framework by highlighting middle-ground user groups and the fluid nature of engagement, where disappointment can escalate into hostility or transition into continued brand support. These insights provide a deeper understanding of online brand crisis engagement and offer implications for organizations seeking to navigate polarized brand discussions and sustain long-term consumer relationships.

ABSTRACT Grounded in the polycrisis concept, Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), and Construal Level Theory (CLT), this study examines how public sentiment and thematic discourse emerged on social media in response to Kenya’s 2024 Finance Bill protests, a crisis intensified by intersecting socio-economic challenges. Sentiment analysis and topic modeling of 99,576 X posts reveal a predominantly negative public sentiment (70.35%), reflecting widespread frustration with the Kenyan government’s fiscal policies. Key themes identified include opposition to the Finance Bill, economic hardship, demands for political accountability, active civic engagement, and media influence on public opinion. The analysis further demonstrates distinct patterns of sentiment expression, with original posts displaying heightened emotional intensity compared to replies, and user influence shaping sentiment, as high-follower accounts amplified unique sentiment trends. These findings hold practical implications for policymakers, media strategists, and crisis communicators, highlighting the importance of transparent, empathetic communication strategies that address public grievances and resonate in complex polycrisis contexts. By advancing the application of SCCT and CLT in the study of socio-political crises, this research highlights social media’s vital role in capturing and shaping public sentiment amid multifaceted crises.

ABSTRACT Earnings announcements are pivotal in companies’ disclosure strategies and are closely watched by capital market participants. This study uses a three-fold approach to analyze these disclosure documents by examining their communicative purpose and by investigating the language and structure of the financial genre. The study uses methods from linguistics: corpus, genre, and corpus-based genre analysis. The analysis moves beyond simple positive/negative word counts by examining evaluation in its full context across lexis, grammar, and discourse organization. The findings of the linguistic analyses support prior research suggesting earnings announcements’ complex communicative purpose. Furthermore, they show that evaluation in lexis, grammar, and structure of earnings announcements ought to be analyzed in context, using a large sample. It is recommended to carry out quantitative and qualitative investigations into the occurrence, contexts, and patterns of use of evaluative and persuasive language, instead of relying on sentiment scores that often fail to consider the context of language use. These investigations are needed before language patterns can be meaningfully operationalized as a variable, which potentially (co-)impacts firm valuation. This study discusses how future research could operationalize complex linguistic patterns as explanatory variables in event studies of market reactions.

ABSTRACT This study aims to analyze communication crises in public institutions, with a particular focus on the one that generated in Spain (and Europe) with the implementation of the coalition known as the Prosperity Guardian. The discussion between the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the commander of Operation Atalanta of the European Union Naval Force (EUNAVFOR) and the Spanish Chief of Defence Staff (JEMAD for its acronym in Spanish) on Spain’s participation in the coalition provides an opportunity to analyze and describe the so-called information fratricide. The paper analyzes the accounts of the main protagonists of the debate on X (formerly Twitter), with special attention to those of the EUNAVFOR ATALANTA operation, and the 106 articles published in Spanish media because of the crisis. The findings show that a strategic post on X draws media attention to the debate, that tactics such as the deletion of messages negatively affect crisis management and that information fratricide has both internal and external repercussions. In this case, the repercussions were particularly negative, affecting not only those who acted but also those who reacted to the framework of the discussion.

ABSTRACT The future of AI in public relations and strategic communications hinges on responsible AI practices, requiring practitioners to address and mitigate biases embedded in proprietary AI models. This study integrates the principles of excellence theory to examine how public relations professionals can adopt responsible AI practices that make their organizations excellent, given PR’s critical communications role in the organization and larger social system. Through a longitudinal analysis of biases across Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation AI models 1.5, 2.1, and XL, the study quantifies disparities and provides a template for replicable bias testing. By generating images from intentionally polarizing sentiment prompts and conducting detailed gender coding, findings reveal consistent underrepresentation of women and socioeconomic stereotypes within the models, exposing the biases inherent in datasets and algorithms. Excellence theory serves as a guiding framework to make clear the ways in which communicators can advocate for responsible AI practices, urging PR professionals to actively audit and benchmark AI tools as part of the ongoing education and improvement of the practice at large.

ABSTRACT As corporations increasingly adopt artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the number of crisis cases where AI application violates social norms and values rises. Research is sparse on the dynamics of ethics of care messaging and crisis involvement in mitigating AI-related corporate crises. To fill this gap, the study employs a 2 (crisis response strategy: excuse vs. apology) × 2 (ethics of care messaging: absence vs. presence) between-subjects experimental design by integrating situational crisis communication theory with ethics of care. Results show that both crisis response strategy and ethics of care messaging, respectively, interact with crisis involvement to affect corporate reputation. Moreover, corporate reputation mediates the interaction effect between crisis response strategy and crisis involvement on product evaluation and purchasing intention. Theoretical and practical implications are addressed.

ABSTRACT Strategy texts are an important way of communicating a strategy to a range of different stakeholders, including internal audiences as the organization communicates with itself (auto-communication). In this article, we analyze two related strategy texts that were produced for auto-communicative purposes as part of a strategic change initiative in a UK organization that employed a storytelling approach to strategic communication. Our multimodal analysis shows how narrative, visual symbolism and directive lexical choices and grammatical forms used in the two strategy texts exercise discursive control using three main mechanisms: (1) encouraging action through future-focused narrative structure; (2) strengthening emotional attachment with the organization through purposeful selection of anecdotes from a shared stock of stories; and (3) defining desired actions and behaviours through visual symbolism and directive lexical choices and grammatical forms. Moreover, the article contributes to current debates of the nature of strategic communication by demonstrating the tension between linear and dialogic communication in practice, while also providing rare empirical insights on the use of auto-communication in contemporary strategic communication.

ABSTRACT Corporate social advocacy (CSA) often positions corporations to champion one side of the values by explicitly voicing their stance on contentious issues, which may evoke divided public reactions. Drawing upon the emotional broadcaster theory, our study investigates the impact of divided CSA responses on consumer behavioral intentions (i.e. online engagement, word of mouth, and purchasing intention) by testing the moderating role of hope emotion and the mediating role of perceived authenticity. The results of an online between-subjects experiment (N = 280) suggested that divided responses (supporting vs. boycotting tweets) influence online engagement, word of mouth, and purchasing intention through perceived authenticity. This indirect effect was contingent on the levels of hope evoked from a CSA campaign among individuals. In the case of high intensity of hope, reading supporting tweets leads to more favorable consumers’ behaviors through enhanced authenticity. Practical implications for exhibiting CSA messages suggest the utility of supporting responses, high intensity of hope emotion, and authentic advocacy efforts for favorable business outcomes.

ABSTRACT During a public health crisis, social media platforms play a pivotal role in circulating information and influencing public reactions. This research investigates the dynamics of public engagement with COVID-19-related content and government information sources within African American online communities, a population that has experienced significant health risks and inequities. Using advanced computational research methods, we analyzed 199,542 posts from 1,152 communities created between January 2020 and December 2022. The present research focused on the presence of COVID-19-related content, government information sources, the emotions of anger and fear in these posts, and their associations with user engagement metrics. The results indicated that posts discussing COVID-19 and those incorporating government information sources tend to receive lower levels of engagement. On the other hand, posts with higher levels of anger generated more shares and comments. The findings suggest a “triple disadvantage” in user engagement for social media messages that reference government sources and discuss public health risks without delivering strong negative emotions. These patterns are crucial not only for understanding the challenges faced by the at-risk population but also for aiding researchers and practitioners in developing more effective communication strategies during public health crises.

ABSTRACT This study investigates individuals’ conspiratorial beliefs about China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic and their effects on their attitudes toward China. While many conspiracy theories about China had been propagated on both traditional and social media, little is known about how this affected individuals’ views on China’s responsibility in the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of such views. An online survey was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 521 Australian citizens in October 2021. The findings showed that individuals who believed in conspiracy theories regarding China’s role in causing the COVID-19 pandemic (a) attributed blame to China, (b) perceived China as an economic threat to Australia, and (c) exhibited stronger preferences for Australian products over Chinese products. This study will contribute to strategic communication scholarship and practice with key insights into how and why specific groups of individuals develop or adopt conspiratorial beliefs during a crisis.