Sense of online betrayal, brand hate, and outrage customers’ anti-brand activism

Abstract

The current study develops a research model and explores the correlation between customer sense of online betrayal, brand hate, and anti-brand activism. The outrage customers’ anti-brand behaviors consist of negative online word of mouth, online public complaining, and online boycott. Data from an online survey of 383 online shoppers were used to test seven proposed hypotheses. The partial least square–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was adopted to assess the measurement and structural model. The findings showed that the sense of online betrayal positively and significantly affects brand hate and anti-brand behaviors. In addition, brand hate is also the leading cause of customers’ anti-brand actions. The present study highlights the mediation role of brand hate in eliciting revenge from consumers subjected to online betrayal. This study also gives some recommendations to customers to stop the misconduct behaviors of online betrayals, such as spreading their betrayal cases to friends and relatives via social media, then asking for supports and help from governmental and legal agencies and participating in boycotts; raising boycott movements against the betraying brand should be considered as the most extreme punishment.

BRAND ACTIVISM: A Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

“…Additionally, 10 articles used the experiment methodology, 6 papers the event study approach, and a few documents utilized the regression model ( n = 2), the structural equation ( n = 2) or a confirmatory factor analysis ( n = 1). Moreover, only three quantitative papers actually focused on brand activism (Sterbenk et al, 2022; Thota, 2021; Maks‐Solomon & Drewry, 2020), the others analyse activism‐related topics that can help us to deepen our knowledge of the phenomenon and understand the state of the art, such as celebrity activism (Jain et al, 2021), social movements (Carberry et al, 2019) or consumer behavior topics such as consumer political ideologies (Flight & Coker, 2022) and consumer anti‐brand activism (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2021; Romani et al, 2015). This result is highly striking because it confirms that brand activism is still in the first stage of the investigation, so it is a nascent theoretical state and needs rigorous further research.…”

“…Related to authenticity is the intervening factor of brand reputation (Zhou & Dong, 2022;Weinzimmer & Esken, 2016): when a brand has a positive reputation, a brand activism action will also be viewed more positively by consumers and supported by them (Weinzimmer & Esken, 2016). Then, we included in this group three other intervening factors: brand communities (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021;Nguyen & Nguyen, 2021;Popp et al, 2016;Romani et al, 2015); consumerbrand identification (Zhou & Dong, 2022;Jain et al, 2021;Hydock et al, 2020) et al, 2012), which is one of the consequences shown in Figure 6. This means that the more consumers identify with a brand and are more emotionally attached to it, the more likely they will be to support and reward a brand activism strategy.…”

“…The impacts of brand activism on consumer purchase intention (Zhou & Dong, 2022;Schmidt et al, 2018), consumer support (Weinzimmer & Esken, 2016), consumer boycott (Neureiter & Bhattacharya, 2021;Nguyen & Nguyen, 2021;Rim et al, 2020), consumer engagement (Johnson et al, 2022;Brandão & Popoli, 2021;Kotler et al, 2021) and consumer loyalty (Key et al, 2021) What is the impact of brand activism on consumer purchase intention?…”

“…The relationship between brands, online communities (Brandão & Popoli, 2021;Popp et al, 2016;Romani et al, 2015) and anti-brand activism (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2021).…”