Strategic crisis response through changing message frames: a case of airline corporations

Abstract

This study explores airline corporations’ crisis communication by underscoring how they capitalized on public relation campaigns to fortify favourable corporate image by conveying positive message frames during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study employed corpus linguistics to assess the evolution of corporate communication with respect to pre/early-crisis and during-crisis stages, based on a large volume of corpus data retrieved from press releases from major aviation enterprises. Message frames changed from business-as-usual with emphasis on business success and optimistic future prospects in the pre/early-crisis phase to corporate image fortification with emphasis on organizational resilience, social responsibility, and empathy. This study introduces a framework of process response, which highlights a mechanism in which resource endowments of organizational capabilities shape the extent to which organizations react to major disturbances through the aforementioned impression management frames. Discussions along with means to reframe business models are presented to identify what airline corporations could do when facing severe adversity. This study contributes to the literature by statistically comparing lexical items from a large corpus of textual contents in different crisis stages to illustrate changes in management’s crisis response tactics and focus through an evolution of framing mechanism.