外文翻译--产品伤害危机对品牌绩效指标的影响.docVIP

外文原文 The effects of product-harm crisis on brand performance Introduction The term ‘product-harm crisis’ refers to well-known events related to product defects or harm associated with some brands (Siomkos Kurzbard 1994). For example, in 2000, when news spread that more than 100 people had died in accidents involving defective Firestone tyres, the company had to recall millions of its products (Advertising Age 2000). In September 2008, 6244 babies in China were diagnosed as suffering from numerous ailments after ingesting the poisonous Sanlu formula (People Daily 2008). Having used all of its cash reserves for product recall and medical payments, Sanlu Company was declared bankrupt in 2009. In 2005, Nestlé Company mistakenly sold milk powder that contained more iodine than Chinese national standards permit in the market. When the news broke, Nestlé had to make a public apology and remove the defective product from shelves (ABC News 2005). After this crisis, in an effort to restore reduced sales, Nestlé gave out samples and stationed doctors in Beijing supermarkets to deal with customers’ concerns. These examples clearly suggest that a product-harm crisis can seriously imperil a brand’s performance - and even totally destroy a company, as in the case of Sanlu. Therefore, understanding how a product-harm crisis influences brands and the market structure is of great practical and theoretical interest. The NBD-Dirichlet model (Ehrenberg 1988) is a well-established statistical model and has been extensively used to audit and predict brand performance measures (BPMs) under stationary and dynamic market structures (Ehrenberg et al. 2004). However, this model has not been used to analyse the influence of product-harm crises. Since a product-harm crisis can greatly affect brand performance, it is reasonable to assume that, by monitoring the BPMs through the product-harm crisis, we can indirectly observe how a product-harm crisis influences brands and the market structure of