Identifying the Brand Crisis Caused by the Food Safety Scandal with a Phenomenological Approach

Food safety has been a hot topic for centuries (Odeyemi et al, 2019). As a result, the main purpose of this article is to identify the brand crisis caused by food safety scandal with a phenomenological approach. For this purpose, interpretive paradigm, qualitative approach, and Phenomenological strategy were used. The data were obtained by comparing two communities of experts and operational managers of food industry companies. In order to reach the experts in the field of marketing - brand and operational managers, the snowball sampling method was chosen and the tactic of hidden content analysis was used to analyze in-depth interviews. MAXQDA 2020 software was used for coding. Findings and results show that the phenomenon of brand crisis is caused by three dimensions of crisis severity, anti-consumption attitude and the severity of the negative consumer feelings, which these three dimensions are fluid and intertwined. They form different levels of brand crisis: brand avoidance, brand dislike, rejection of brand hegemony, opposition to the brand and brand hate.