The different shades of brand hate: A qualitative approach

Abstract

While Brand Love has been extensively studied, Brand Hate is still in the early stages of its theoretical development. Aiming to reduce that gap, this project has three main goals: first, conduct a thorough literature review, seeking to consolidate what has been written about the concepts of love, hate, brand love, brand hate and several supportive elements such as emotions, consumer-brand relationships, brand and anti-brand communities; second, perform and code multiple semi-structured/in-depth interviews, analyse and discuss the Portuguese costumer’s perception on the topic and link it with academia; third, build a literate crossing between Marketing and Linguistics that can be used by future studies. Supporting these objectives is the Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology. Among the findings generated by this process, seven facets were uncovered: emotions are essential to the shopping experience; there is an occasional contemporaneity between diverse elements of Active Brand Hate; Negative Past Experiences was the most cited antecedent of Brand Hate; it is possible to turn Brand Hate into neutral or positive relationships, but so is the inverse; Negative Double Jeopardy should be divided into parcels; Oppositional Brand Loyalty ought be tested as another antecedent; there are dissimilar types of Brand Hostages.