Mechanism of Consumer Brand Advocacy Based on Emotion and Identity: An Analysis from the Perspective of Computational Communication Studies on the Food Safety Crisis of Mixue
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63313/SSH.9087Keywords:
Mixue, Spontaneous Advocacy, Brand Reputation DamageAbstract
After Mixue was exposed for "overnight ingredients and store hygiene" in March 2025, a "counter-crisis" phenomenon of spontaneous consumer advocacy emerged, which traditional brand crisis theories struggle to explain. Combining social identity theory, emotional communication theory, and computational communication studies methods, this study uses 25,375 comments from 3 core Douyin videos as data, and conducts empirical research through text mining, sentiment analysis, and the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic model. The results show that spontaneous advocacy includes four types of discourse: emotional identification, cost-effectiveness defense, exposure questioning, and humorous meme-based defense. Among these, 71.8% of the comments express positive sentiment, with "grinning face" and "facepalm" emojis appearing frequently. Secondly, this advocacy behavior is driven by three mechanisms: identity recognition (the sinking market categorizes the brand as an "in-group"), emotional communication (anthropomorphism/playful ridicule to defuse criticism), and brand characteristics (low price/affordability/Xue Wang IP's "emotional contract"). Finally, the LDA topic model confirms the synergistic effect between themes such as "family diet analogy" and "brand comparison" and emotional projection.
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