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INTRODUCTION
From news that a brand of Bausch & Lomb's contact lens solution was associated with a type of eye fungus to deadly E. coli bacteria in raw spinach, crises reinforce to marketers and advertising agencies that maintaining a solid brand image is imperative in a crisis situation (Vence, 2006). However, some crises violate an unspoken rule: don't mess with children or pets. Although the use of animals or children in an ad may boost its effectiveness, companies lose credibility if they do anything wrong to children or animals (Tan, 2007). In these cases, brand image is a much bigger problem because consumer expectations about products made for children and pets are higher (Mahoney, 2007). When a crisis struck the pet food industry, as it did in March 2007, fears about food manufacturing met fears about consumers' abilities to take care of their most 'dependent of dependents: their pets' (Paradiso, 2007).
On 16 March, 2007, Menu Foods, Inc. announced a recall of more than 60 million packages of 'cuts and gravy' style dog and cat foods produced in the previous 3 months, after receiving complaints of kidney failure in pets who had consumed the food (Menu Foods, 2007a). As North America's largest pet food supplier, Menu Foods manufactures pet foods sold under more than 100 brand names ranging from Procter & Gamble's (P&G's) Iams and Eukanuba brands, Colgate-Palmolive's Science Diet, and Nestle Purina's Mighty Dog, to private-label brands for Walmart and Meijer (Neff, 2007a). That same day, P&G initiated a recall of its moist cat and dog foods manufactured by Menu Foods. Over the next few weeks, as veterinarians warned consumers to bring their pets in immediately if they showed signs of appetite loss, lethargy, or vomiting, other companies issued individual brand recalls. Ultimately, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) linked the deaths to the chemical melamine, which was believed to have been added to the pet foods in order to boost protein levels in wheat gluten imported from China (Mullman and Neff, 2007).
Sixty-two percent of US households have at least one pet, and spending by US consumers on their 164.6 million dogs and cats has doubled in the past decade to US$52.87 bn (APPA, 2012). Marketers recognize the importance of pets in the...