Brand “Black Swan”: A Study on Brand Equity Risk Prevention from the Perspective of Information Fatigue

Abstract

Amid the rapid iteration of the media environment and increasingly saturated market competition, brand equity has become a core strategic resource for enterprises to maintain market competitiveness and build longterm development barriers. However, under the new media communication landscape, mature Chinese brands such as Xibei and Haidilao, which possess high market awareness, find it difficult to withstand the impact of sudden brand “black swan” events, leading to the rapid collapse of brand equity. Drawing on information fatigue theory and the brand equity model, this study adopts a mixed-method approach combining content analysis and in-depth interviews to investigate two representative brand “black swan” events-the Xibei premade dish crisis and the Haidilao “urination” food safety incident. Through the stratified random sampling of 504 and 531 valid comments from major social media platforms, combined with 15 semi-structured indepth interviews, this study explores the mechanism by which information fatigue drives the collapse of brand equity. The results show that the essence of brand “black swan” collapse lies in the structural imbalance of “high awareness, low emotional attachment”; users’ rapid negative reactions stem from the concentrated release of long-accumulated information fatigue; and effective crisis response must center on “transparency, sincerity, action, and compensation.” This study introduces information fatigue into the brand equity risk research framework, providing theoretical reference and practical guidance for enterprises to build risk prevention and crisis response systems in the information-overload environment.