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Exploration of indirect anti-brand behaviour and proposed response strategies

Hellemans, Margaux

(2021)

Details

Supervisors

De Moerloose, Chantal

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, the Internet has radically changed marketing and consumers’ place in the marketplace. Consumers can now participate in the communication from the brand. Where marketing was before a one-way form of communication, it has now turned into a two-sided conversation. Other than the benefits from this change, this has also caused consumers to have more power in the market and to be more demanding. As a result, they are more often dissatisfied and have more power to respond accordingly, putting companies at a higher risk of being the victim of anti-brand behaviour. This paper aims at exploring the various forms of anti-brand behaviour, namely boycotts, negative word of mouth, brand avoidance, customer retaliation and consumer brand sabotage. These different phenomena were explored by comparing existing academic literature on each phenomenon separately to identify its cause, the objective of the consumer engaging in it, what moderates their decision of engaging in it and finally what the effects are of the behaviour on the company and observing consumers. A typology based on objective and the form of behaviour visualised that the different behaviours largely are caused by the same objectives and causes. As a result, we concluded that the choice of a consumer between the different forms of consumer misbehaviour is largely dependent on the moderators. The study also showed that anti-brand behaviour can have severe negative effects on a company’s reputation, profitability and relationship with other consumers as a result of the negative publicity generated by the anti-brand behaviour. As a result, the remainder of the paper attempts to explore the different response strategies to deal with anti-brand behaviour. To explore this broad subject, we first identified academic literature on response strategies based on three categories, namely managing negative publicity, reputation management and managing anti-brand behaviour. Based on this, we identified ten themes of possible strategies to deal with anti-brand behaviour, namely preparing for negative publicity, accommodative vs responsive strategies, proactive vs reactive strategies, no reaction, spreading information, reputation management, proactive marketing, corporate social responsibility, handling negative publicity spread by consumers online and handling boycotts. These themes and the corresponding findings were tested by interviewing six experts in communication in semi-directive interviews. The transcriptions of these interviews were then analysed using deductive thematic analysis in Atlas TI. We found that experts mainly agree with what the literature proposes. However, a major difference lies in that most literature states that not responding can have detrimental effects on the company, based on the consumers feeling ignored and the company losing control over the situation. However, most experts stated that a lot of negative publicity, especially online is not worth interacting with.