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Announcement: Winner 2018 IJRM Best Article

The European Marketing Academy (EMAC) and the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) are pleased to announce the winner of the 2018 IJRM Best Paper Award:

Brand crises in the digital age: The short- and long-term effects of social media firestorms on consumers and brands. Nele Hansen, Ann-Kristin Kupfer, and Thorsten Hennig-Thurau. Volume 35, Issue 4, Pages 557-574.

Abstract:

Social media firestorms imply the sudden occurrence of many, predominantly negative social media expressions against a brand. Do such firestorms leave a mark on consumers and their brand judgments—in the short term but also over time—to a degree that deserves managerial attention? What kind of firestorms have the strongest destructive potential? This manuscript treats firestorms as a digital form of brand crisis and proposes a conceptual framework to identify which firestorms harm short- and long-term brand perceptions and become part of consumers’ long-term memory. A unique data set combines secondary data about 78 real-life firestorms with daily brand perceptions obtained from the YouGov panel and survey data from 997 consumers. The results indicate that of all affected brands, 58% suffer from a decrease in short-term brand perceptions, and 40% suffer long-term negative effects, suggesting that social media firestorms can indeed harm businesses but also show that strong variations exist. Contingency analyses of the conceptual framework with regressions and generalized estimating equations indicate that social media firestorms are most impactful in terms of negative brand association changes and/or memory effects when they are initiated by a vivid trigger (e.g., video in the first firestorm tweet), linked to a product/service or social failure, characterized by a large volume of social media messages, and when they last longer.

Selection process:
The winning article was chosen from two rounds of voting open only to the members of the IJRM Editorial Board. In the first round, each voter nominated up to three (3) papers that were published in IJRM in 2018. Nine (9) papers received the most nominations. In the second/final round, the Board Members voted for one paper from this list of nine papers. The winning paper is the one that received the most votes.

Prof. Iris W. Hung (IJRM Co-Editor) presented the award on May 31 during the EMAC conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Three Finalists:

• Endogeneity in survey research. Jon Bingen Sande, Mrinal Ghosh. Volume 35 (2), Pages 185-204
• Brand crises in the digital age: The short- and long-term effects of social media firestorms on consumers and brands. Nele Hansen, Ann-Kristin Kupfer, Thorsten Hennig-Thurau. Volume 35 (4), Pages 557-574
• On the monetary impact of fashion design piracy. Gil Appel, Barak Libai, Eitan Muller. Volume 35 (4), Pages 591-610.

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