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Deepfakes are fabricated content created by replacing an original image or video with someone else. Deepfakes have recently become commonplace in politics, posing serious challenges to democratic integrity. The advancement of AI-enabled technology and machine learning has made creating synthetic videos relatively easy. This study explores the role of political brand hate and individual moral consciousness in influencing electorates' intention to share political deepfake content.

The study creates and uses a fictional deepfake video to test the proposed model. Data are collected from N = 310 respondents in India and tested using partial least square–structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS v3.

The findings support that ideological incompatibility with the political party leads to political brand hate, positively affecting the electorates' intention to share political deepfake videos. This effect is partially mediated by users' reduced intention to verify political deepfake videos. In addition, it is observed that individual moral consciousness positively moderates the effect of political brand hate on the intention to share political deepfake videos. Intention to share political deepfake videos thus becomes a motive to seek revenge on the hated party, an expression of an individual's ideological hate and a means to preserve one's moral self-concept and strengthen their ideologies and moral beliefs.

The study expands the growing discussion about disseminating political deepfake videos using the theoretical lens of the negative consumer-brand relationship. It validates the effect of political brand hate on irrational behavior that is intended to cause harm to the hated party. Further, it provides a novel perspective that individual moral consciousness may fuel the haters' desire to engage in anti-branding behavior. Political ideological incompatibility reflects ethical reasons for brand hate. Therefore, hate among individuals with high moral consciousness serves to preserve their moral self.

Despite the growing competition between higher education institutions and the empirical evidence that the brand is a relevant determinant of consumer preference, research studies on negative consumer–brand relationships (CBRs) are still scarce. Thus, this research intends to fill this gap, determining the antecedents of brand hate in educational institutions and identifying gender differences regarding the determinants of brand hate.

A survey was carried out with 450 current students from higher education institutions. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS3.

According to the results, previous negative experiences are the most significant driver of brand hate, with higher emphasis on male students. In this sense, investment in customer experience management (CXM) consists of a relevant strategy for higher education institutions. It was also observed that female students develop hate for ideological incongruity (ethical/moral behavior) and symbolic incongruence (lack of brand identity), revealing unprecedented facets of the phenomenon.

This research extends the studies’ negative CBRs to educational institutions. It explores gender differences related to brand hate; a topic not explored before, but that enables a targeted approach of brand strategies. Finally, it provides managerial implications allowing the strategy to reduce negative CBRs and their consequences in educational institutions.

This study aimed at investigating negative past experience (NPE), symbolic incongruity and ideological incompatibility on celebrity brand hate (CBH) within the arts marketing sector.

Anchored on the self-congruity theory (SCT), the study is based on two studies with 618 hip-life music (HLM) listeners in Ghana (Study 1 = 340 face-to-face participants; study 2 = 278 online participants), who responded to 20 celebrities they hate. The study validates Hegner et al.'s (2017) product brand hate (BH) model in the arts sector utilizing the structural equal modeling in testing the research hypotheses.

The study found that negative past experience, symbolic incongruity, and ideological incompatibility significantly influences CBH. Furthermore, CBH significantly influences celebrity brand avoidance (CBA) and negative word-of-mouth (NWoM), brand retaliation, private complaint and brand switching. Nevertheless, CBH had no significant influence on CBA in the second study. In all, BH had the strongest effects on NWoM for products in Hegner et al. (2017) model, whereas in our model BH strongly impacts on brand retaliation for celebrities (i.e. people).

The study provided evidence to marketing scholars, celebrity image managers and brand professionals, on critical factors to consider in building and sustaining celebrity brands as viable currencies for economic leveraging within the arts industry.

Though BH has received academic recognition, little is known about the concept of CBH and its outcomes in the arts marketing literature.

In brand activism, a brand promotes contested sociopolitical causes to highlight its values. Brand activism also alienates those consumers who disagree with the cause, who might, consequently, target the brand with critical, negative or even aggressive actions. This paper aims to study the triggers and strategies of consumers’ antibrand actions given in response to brand activism.

Qualitative content analysis and multiple correspondence analysis were used to study consumer responses directed at a chocolate brand’s campaign that advocated civilized online conversions and opposed hate speech, a politically heated topic. In total, 1,615 messages were collected from social media platforms.

Field infringement, political accusations and questioned impact of the campaign triggered consumers to turn against the campaign. Strategies to undermine it included boycotting, discrediting the brand and trapping. Trapping – creatively using technological affordances to create harm to the brand – was typically triggered by political associations.

Findings relate to the critical responses regarding one campaign only.

By understanding the political discussion around the chosen cause, including the opponents’ typical triggers and strategies, brand activism can more credibly advocate for contested social causes and communicate brand values.

Political antibrand actions are distinct from the previously identified functional and ethical antibrand actions, and they are noninstrumental by nature. Practices that are native to social media are central to political antibrand actions, and social media platforms contribute to how such disappointment is articulated and acted upon.

Negativity towards a brand is typically conceived as a significant problem for brand managers. This paper aims to show that negativity towards a brand can represent an opportunity for companies when brand polarization occurs. To this end, the paper offers a new conception of the brand polarization phenomenon and reports exploratory findings on the benefits of consumers’ negativity towards brands in the context of brand polarization.

To develop a conception of brand polarization, the paper builds on research on polarizing brands and extends it by integrating insights from systematic literature reviews in three bodies of literature: scholarship on brand rivalry and, separately, polarization in political science and social psychology. Using qualitative data from 22 semi-structured interviews, the paper explores possible advantages of brand polarization.

This paper defines the brand polarization phenomenon and identifies multiple perspectives on brand polarization. Specifically, the findings highlight three distinct parties that can benefit from brand polarization: the polarizing brand as an independent entity; the brand team behind the polarizing brand; and the passionate consumers involved with the polarizing brand. The data reveal specific advantages of brand polarization associated with the three parties involved.

Managers of brands with a polarizing nature could benefit from having identified a group of lovers and a group of haters, as this could allow them to improve their focus when developing and implementing the brands’ strategies.

This exploratory study is the first explicitly focusing on the brand polarization phenomenon and approaches negativity towards brands as a potential opportunity.

Consumer–brand relationship literature has seen a recent surge of work on the concept of brand hate. Considering that hate is not easily acknowledged, it is challenging to uncover the psychological mechanisms that underpin its development. Using the concept of “self” as over-arching theory, this study aims to uncover consumers’ psychological triggers for hating a brand by providing contextualized perspectives from the informants.

The authors use an interpretive approach focused on exploring the role of self in explaining the development of brand hate. Data is collected through 25 in-depth interviews and inductively analysed using the NVivo 12.

The findings of the study align with the motivational perspective of hate discussed in psychology literature. Six psychological strategies (coping, moral consciousness, ego defense, self-esteem protection, power reinstatement, and self-concept strengthening) cater to three motives of the self (self-preservation, self-defense, and self-enhancement).

The current study uses an interdisciplinary approach and draws perspectives from psychology, sociology and interpersonal relationship theories to study consumer brand hate. It uncovers the subconscious mechanisms that lead to the germination of brand hate and provides answers to unexplained and missing pieces in the existing literature. In particular, it offers a detailed perspective on how self-related motives can explain the psychology of brand hate.

This study aims to examine the role of hope and hate in political leaders’ messages in influencing liberals versus conservatives’ social-distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the increasing political partisanship across the world today, using the appropriate message framing has important implications for social and public policy.

The authors use two Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods – a pretrained package (HateSonar) and a classifier built to implement our supervised neural network-based model architecture using RoBERTa – to analyze 61,466 tweets by each US state’s governor and two senators with the goal of examining the association between message factors invoking hate and hope and increased or decreased social distancing from March to May 2020. The authors examine individuals’ social-distancing behaviors (the amount of nonessential driving undertaken) using data from 3,047 US counties between March 13 and May 31, 2020, as reported by Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports and the New York Times repository of COVID-19 data.

The results show that for conservative state leaders, the use of hate increases nonessential driving of state residents. However, when these leaders use hope in their speech, nonessential driving of state residents decreases. For liberal state leaders, the use of hate displays a directionally different result as compared to their conservative counterparts.

Amid the emergence of new analytic techniques and novel data sources, the findings demonstrate that the use of global positioning systems data and social media analysis can provide valuable and precise insights into individual behavior. They also contribute to the literature on political ideology and emotion by demonstrating the use of specific emotion appeals in targeting specific consumer segments based on their political ideology.

The findings have significant implications for policymakers and public health officials regarding the importance of considering partisanship when developing and implementing public health policies. As partisanship continues to increase, applying the appropriate emotion appeal in messages will become increasingly crucial. The findings can help marketers and policymakers develop more effective social marketing campaigns by tailoring specific appeals given the political identity of the consumer.

Using Neural NLP methods, this study identifies the specific factors linking social media messaging from political leaders and increased compliance with health directives in a partisan population.

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.

Brand hate as a distinct phenomenon of consumer negativity has attracted considerable research attention in recent years. However, scant attention has been paid to explain the underlying mechanism of brand hate. Therefore, the present study aims to unveil how brand hate stirs in embarrassing situations and what repercussions it ignites that deteriorate the consumer–brand relationship.

The present study follows a mixed-method research design by conducting in-depth interviews with 16 consumers and then collecting three waves of time-lagged data from 217 respondents of two different countries. The reliability and validity have been established through confirmatory factor analysis, and hypotheses were analyzed using structural equation modeling and moderated-mediated models.

The results of both qualitative and quantitative investigations reveal that brand embarrassment instigates brand hate, and brand hate leads to brand detachment. Brand hate also mediates the relationship between brand embarrassment and brand detachment. Consumer vanity enhances the strength of brand embarrassment's effects on brand hate. This relationship further depicts the moderated mediation pattern as consumers with high vanity traits express extreme emotions of hate and detachment from the embarrassing brands. In addition, the findings demonstrate that the moderating role of consumer vanity is more pronounced among young consumers.

The study marks an initial attempt to explain the whole process of brand hate by incorporating brand embarrassment, brand detachment, consumer vanity and age in an integrated moderated mediation model. The study enhances brand managers' understanding of the severity of the consequences of embarrassing situations and devising preventive strategies.