Student Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

Fall 12-15-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Program of Study

Communication - Corporate Communication

Language

English

First Advisor

Minna Logemann

Second Advisor

Caryn Medved

Abstract

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been impacted the whole world. One of the hardest-hit industries in the aviation industry. This research investigates how COVID-19 challenged this sector. It focuses especially on how American Airlines and Lufthansa Group got impacted and what they tried to do to recover from this crisis. This paper’s primary focus is on how those two airlines changed their communication strategy and their marketing to regain customer trust and their reputation. It looks at different researchers and their theories to overcome such a crisis like this and discusses different airlines and what they did when they were in a crisis. The results show, that both airlines did a great job adapting to the new situation and rethinking and restructuring and coming out with new and different marketing and communication strategies. Those strategies aligned with the theories of the researchers from the paper such as the SCCT theory from Timothy Coombs and the image restoration theory from William Benoit.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.