Legitimacy Gaps in Corporate vs. Consumer Logic

Abstract

This study examines the controversy over McDonald’s Pokémon Happy Meal in Japan and visualizes the gap between corporate response/apology statements and consumer reactions in Yahoo! News comments through quantitative text analysis. We scraped corporate statements and user comments and analyzed them with KHCoder using co-occurrence networks and correspondence analysis. The corporate corpus predominantly used procedural vocabulary such as restrictions, operations, countermeasures, and implementation, whereas the comment corpus centered on evaluative terms including resale, disposal, food loss, children, and fairness. In the integrated correspondence analysis, the two vocabularies were separated within the same lexical space. This pattern indicates a legitimacy gap arising from mismatched problem framing between the organization and the public. Accordingly, the findings suggest that crisis communication should, before announcing operational measures, articulate the public’s salient concerns in shared language and employ an empathetic message design that reconnects actions with values for credible recovery of reputation and trust.