Blizzard & NBA : A Comparison Between Hong Kong Crisis Communication

Absztrakt (kivonat)

This research provides insight into on how the evolution of the and its new age has grown in the last twenty years. This thesis lay upon the corporate communication and the crisis communication fields as its foundation, clearly describing their characteristics, goals and objectives in an everyday business setting, as well as a theoretical research setting. The main goal of this research is to provide an opportunity for future studies and corporate crisis communicational strategies to be built upon this. I believe that an interconnected investigation of crisis communication, where during one crisis several aspects and actors are studies can lead to more effective research in these topics as well as it can provide as a new simulation training for special crisis communication trainings. The thesis covers several works of T. W. Coombs, who has been a constantly reoccurring name in my research. His works with Holladay and Tachkova provided two main focal points for this paper. Fill and Roper’s work also served as a foundation stone for my work, their book is extremely detailed and diverse. The works of van Riel and Fombrun are also staples, as they are well respected among the researchers within these topics. Bloch’s work from 2014, which covers corporate identity and reputation strategies provided me with magnificent insight. The research part of the thesis covers the crisis situation of Hong Kong that happened in 2019-2020. The event has affected me greatly and made me even more interested in human rights research. However, the main part of the research is the comparison of the parallel events experienced by two great American companies, NBA and Blizzard. They are of course two very different companies as they conduct their business in different fields. However, this crisis affected them both heavily. I decided to jump into this topic for this reason, as I was very intrigued by their different but same situations, their use of corporate communication and crisis communication tactics. Another factor that is introduced in this paper is the rise of the personal brands and social influencers as a result of Web 2.0 and the dynamic change of trends on social media. Lebron James is undoubtedly one of the most influential people of Earth. His crisis communication during the event, however, fascinated me and I decided to cover this topic too. Given its interconnectedness to corporate branding, it was clear that this is the right decision. The thesis provides great basis for future research on the topic, as it is a quite unique approach towards crisis management research. I hope that new trainings and empirical research papers will built upon my work at least to some extent.