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This paper aims to investigate consumers’ attitudinal and behavioral responses to brand crisis and examine an empirical model to explain consumer’s internal process in the context of negative information about a brand, analyzing the relationships between the brand association types, brand-customer relationship strength and consumers’ responses depending on the types of brand crises.

This study uses an integrative approach based on qualitative and quantitative methods: a focus-group interview and an experiment.

The results indicated that consumers’ responses were more favorable in the corporate ability (CA) crisis than in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) crisis. In addition, consumers with high brand-customer relationship strength and brand associations for CA (CSR) showed more favorable responses to a brand crisis related to CA (CSR) than to that related to CSR (CA).

Managerially, firms should improve their marketing activity to reinforce particular brand association type that strongly related customers mainly have. In addition, firms should carefully find the best timing and channel that strongly related customers usually access, to present corporate corresponding statements in brand crisis and information of their corporate crisis-coping process.

Theoretically, this study will contribute to the literature on brand crises by providing critical insights into the mechanism underlying consumers’ responses to brand crises.

This study aims to explore the role of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot marketing efforts (CMEs) in the establishment of relationships between brands and their customers, extending the link between relationship marketing and online consumer behavioral intentions.

Data are collected from 1,072 customers in the USA, who used chatbot marketing activities from any of 30 brands leading their industries in messaging innovation. Structural equation modeling is used for data analysis.

Results show that interaction, information, accessibility, entertainment and customization are important CMEs components. CMEs have significant direct effects on the quality of communication with chatbot agents and indirectly affect customer–brand relationships (CBR) and customer response. In addition, the findings demonstrate that CBR mediates the association between communication quality and customer response.

Implications of this study can enable practitioners to understand the effects of AI on user experiences and provide a guide for the development of CMEs strategies and relationship building.

The purpose of this study is to study the impact of relationship marketing orientation (RMO) and relationship quality on customers' commitment and pro-marketer behavior (positive word of mouth and external attribution) after negative brand publicity by using the combined lens of relationship marketing theory and the theory of cognitive dissonance.

A survey was conducted among banking customers in India using an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling and the bootstrapping procedure using the SPSS process macro.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, findings of this study suggest that RMO and relationship quality are positively correlated to commitment even after negative publicity. The path between RMO, relationship quality and pro-provider behavior is found to be mediated by commitment. This indirect path is moderated by customers' cognitive dissonance arising out of the negative publicity.

The study establishes the combined roles of RMO and relationship quality in pre-empting the detrimental effects of negative brand publicity. Further, it establishes interactions of cognitive dissonance with these relationship variables, thereby bringing together literature from relationship marketing theory and cognitive dissonance theory.

This research aims to systematically explore the cognitive and emotional effects of values-related and performance-related negative brand publicity and investigate how the psychological effects translate into different behavioural outcomes. In addition, it examines the relative effectiveness of two major brand response strategies in mitigating negative publicity.

Two experimental studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. Study 1 examines the effects of values- and performance-related negative brand publicity, using a 3 (negative brand publicity: values-related vs performance-related vs control) × 2 (brand: Dove vs Axe) between-subjects experiment. Study 2 further compares the effects of two major brand response strategies on consumers’ post-crisis perceived trustworthiness and trust and responses towards a brand involved in negative publicity. A 2 (negative brand publicity: values-related vs performance-related) × 2 (brand response strategy: reduction-of-offensiveness vs corrective action) between-subjects design was used.

The results suggest that values-related negative brand publicity is perceived as being more diagnostic and elicits a stronger emotion of contempt, but a weaker emotion of pity than performance-related negative brand publicity. Moreover, values-related negative brand publicity has a stronger negative impact on consumer responses than performance-related negative brand publicity. Interestingly, compared to perceived diagnosticity of information and the emotion of pity, the emotion of contempt is more likely to cause differences in consumer responses to these two types of negative brand publicity. Regarding brand response strategy, corrective action is more effective than reduction-of-offensiveness for both types of negative brand publicity, but the advantage of corrective action is greater for the performance-related case.

This research enriches the negative publicity and brand perception literature, showing the asymmetric cognitive, emotional and behavioural effects of values- and performance-related negative brand publicity. It also identifies the psychological mechanisms underlying consumer responses to negative brand publicity, and it provides empirical evidence for the relative effectiveness of two major brand response strategies.

This study aims to empirically examine the determinants of corporate hypocrisy and to investigate the potential negative impact on the consumer–brand relationship, specifically on trust, switch and resilience intentions.

A 2 (mission: no and yes) × 3 (sustainability activities: perfect, imperfect and no duty) experiment was developed. A total of 548 US consumers were randomly assigned to one of six case conditions and asked to respond to an online survey. The responses were analyzed by both two-way analysis of variance and PROCESS.

The results showed that respondents who saw clear sustainability goals in the companies’ mission statements had lower levels of corporate hypocrisy than those who did not, and when the mission statements and activities related to corporate sustainability were congruent, the respondents were less likely to elicit corporate hypocrisy than when they were not. Also, consumers showed lower levels of trust when corporate hypocrisy was present, which negatively impacted their switch and resilience intentions.

This study provided empirical evidence demonstrating how and to what extent corporate hypocrisy is formed by varying sustainability goals and activities. These findings urge brand managers to recognize the ripple effect created by a mismatch between their stated sustainability goals and their activities. Also, these findings could provide apparel management with guidelines for formulating and communicating companies’ sustainability goals and activities.

By outlining the evolution of brand management research over the past 25 years, as reported in the Journal of Product and Brand Management (JPBM), this paper aims to analyze the changes in the way branding has been approached in research, highlight the current challenges the discipline faces and suggest future research avenues that will hopefully further enrich brand management knowledge.

This paper includes internal historical literature review and commentary.

After a thorough analysis of the journal’s content, the contribution that the JPBM has made in the development of brand management knowledge over the past 25 years is highlighted. Eight major shifts in brand management research and thought, and three overarching difficulties and challenges, are identified.

By solely focusing on the contributions published in the journal, by no means this review is exhaustive and includes all the contributions to the discipline. Its contribution is limited to the analysis of the work, and the evolution of brand management thinking, recorded in the JPBM.

The paper highlights the evolution of brand management thought and presents imperatives and challenges to guide future research in brand management.

Through activism, brands participate in the sociopolitical controversies that shape society today. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to examine the moderating effects of consumer–brand identification (CBI) and political ideology in explaining consumer responses to brand activism. Furthermore, the role of perceived marginalization that can arise in the case of consumer–brand disagreement is explored.

The hypothesized effects were tested in three experiments. Study 1 (n = 262) and Study 2 (n = 322) used a moderation analysis, which was supplemented by a mixed design analysis with repeated measures in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 383), the mediating effect of perceived marginalization by the brand was tested using a moderated mediation model.

The results show that strong CBI as well as a conservative ideology buffer the negative effects of consumer–brand disagreement on brand attitude and word-of-mouth intentions. In the case of agreement with a brand’s stance, no direct or interactive effects of brand activism on consumer responses occur. Perceived marginalization by a brand mediates the effects of brand activism.

This study extends the “love is blind” versus “love becomes hate” debate to the realm of brand activism and finds evidence for the former effect. It also contributes to the research on political consumption by highlighting the role of political ideology as an important boundary condition for brand activism. Perceived marginalization is identified as a relevant risk for activist brands.

The brand crisis literature remains unilateral and scattered, necessitating academic effort to comprehend the extant body of knowledge. This study aims to provide the required comprehensive overview of the domain, by outlining its significance, progression and future research directions.

Following the PRISMA approach, journal articles for review are selected. The study uses a hybrid (structured and bibliometric) review, to provide a systematic insight and graphical visualization of the existing literature. It applies VOSviewer software to analyse bibliographic data through citation and co-occurrence analysis.

The hybrid review outlines most-cited articles, authors, frequently used theories, methodologies and data analysis techniques in this domain. Findings are further presented as integrative framework that distinctly highlights prior studies from a dichotomous perspective and across three stages of crisis. Finally, research opportunities and directions for future research are presented.

The study is useful for scholars and practitioners to understand the brand crisis literature and to cognize the inferences drawn by distinct researchers. It provides contemporary research agendas using the theory, context and method (TCM) framework, to augment future investigations through interdisciplinary approach.

To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that synthesizes the academic work of brand crisis using a hybrid method. Also, the novelty of the work lies in presenting the future research direction in the form of multiple (macro, meso and micro) levels with inter-disciplinary theoretical underpinnings.

This study aims to examine how culture influences consumer attitudes toward the brands of products they own during a product-harm crisis. To this end, average consumers from two countries - the USA, representing a highly individualistic society and China, a less individualistic (i.e. collectivist) society – are compared.

The study conducts an invariance test of the measurement model for a more rigorous comparison of the two countries. Structural equation modeling is performed to identify how average consumers respond to a product-harm crisis (e.g. iPhone explosion) based on survey results of 188 American and 197 Chinese consumers.

These results reveal that in both countries, an individual’s susceptibility to a normative interpersonal influence determines their brand consciousness, which, in turn, enhances consumer attachment to well-known brands, resulting in favorable brand attitudes. During a brand crisis, an owned brand’s buffering effect is observed among consumers high in brand consciousness in collectivistic but not in individualistic societies. The moderating role of feelings of betrayal on the brand attachment-consumer attitude relationship is also reported.

Culture shapes consumer behavioral patterns. In today’s global market, a company’s decisions are no longer limited by borders and many companies experience product failures. Thus, findings that show consumers’ distinguishable psychological experiences between different cultures contribute to crisis management literature.