Trust Repair Efforts and Repurchase Intention after Negative Publicity of Milk Powder in Sri Lanka

This paper aimed to examine the impact of trust repair efforts on consumers repurchase intention of milk powder products affected by negative publicity in Sri Lanka. Consumer response to business entity’s effort to mitigate negative information are understudied in developing economies including Sri Lanka. A quantitative survey design was opted for this study. Data was collected from 140 consumers residing in the western province of Sri Lanka employing a questionnaire during the pandemic. The proposed hypotheses were analyzed using an OLS regression. Our findings revealed that functional repair efforts, affective repair efforts, and informational repair efforts have a significant and positive impact on repurchase intention. Among the three trust repair efforts, informational repair efforts were found to be the most important trust repair efforts that influence the repurchase intention. Based on the findings, milk powder producers in Sri Lanka should pay attention to strengthening ties with the consumers and consider trust repairing efforts to negate negative campaigns. The main limitation of the study is that data collection had to be limited among the urban consumers and collecting data randomly was challenging due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, our study contributes to the growing body of literature on trust repairing and trust theory from an under-explored economic and socio-cultural context.