Abstract
Deciding whether to use the CEO as a spokesperson during an overseas product harm crisis is a very complex issue. However, multinationals can benefit from systematically analyzing factors related to the characteristics of the CEO, the nature of the crisis, and characteristics of consumers in overseas markets before arriving at a decision. This book chapter presents a framework incorporating these factors based on literature from social psychology about social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1986), literature from international business on the concept of cultural distance (Gudykunst and Hammer 1984), and the country of origin effect (Chattalas and Takada 2013), and literature from the field of marketing related to consumer ethnocentrism (Guo and Lin 2017) and consumer animosity (Klein, Ettenson and Morris 1998). The framework will assist both companies in assessing whether to use the CEO during an overseas product harm crisis, as well as researchers in identifying areas for future research.
