Brand Avoidance: Relations Between Brand-related Stimuli and Negative Emotions

Monika Kavaliauskė,Edita Simonavičiūtė

doi:10.15388/omee.2015.6.1.14227

Monika Kavaliauskė, Edita Simonavičiūtė

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.15388/omee.2015.6.1.14227

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Abstract

The article analyses one of the parts of anti-consumption phenomenon – brand avoidance. Most of the research on the topic of brand avoidance is usually qualitative, analysing only singular brand avoidance reasons, whereas this article employs a quantitative method to analyse brand avoidance, including different brand-related stimuli (unmet expectations, symbolic incongruence, unacceptable trade-off, ideological incompatibility) and the negative emotions (dislike, anger, worry, embarrassment) consumers feel towards brands. What is more, this research is the first to analyse brand avoidance in the context of emerging markets, as previous studies were carried out in Western countries. However, it was found that different brand-related stimuli have positive relations mainly with dislike emotion, which was the only one influencing brand avoidance.

Highlights

Rated brands are extremely important to business as enterprises have possibility to gain competitive advantage through their successful brands (Keller, 1993; Lassar et al, 1995)
Research model and hypotheses ere is a lack of research and especially quantitative research on brand avoidance and relations among brand-related stimuli, di erent negative emotional reactions, and brand avoidance behaviour (Lee et al, 2009a; Lee et al, 2009b; Truong et al, 2011), this study aims to develop an initial understanding about the issue. erefore, the objective of this paper’s empirical research is to examine relations between di erent brand-related stimuli and various consumers’ negative emotions toward brands, as well as the relations between these various negative emotions and consumers’ intention to avoid these brands
Brands towards which respondents feel negative emotions e study of the survey results showed that of all 328 respondents almost 80% do feel negative emotions toward speci c brands. 257 respondents have indicated in total 145 di erent brands. e brands most frequently mentioned by respondents included “Norfa” (4.3%), “Lukoil” (3.9%), “Maxima” (3.9%), “McDonald’s” (3.1%), “Optima linija” (3.1%), and meat products branded by name “Tarybinės“ (2.7%)

Summary

Introduction

Rated brands are extremely important to business as enterprises have possibility to gain competitive advantage through their successful brands (Keller, 1993; Lassar et al, 1995). Positive consumer behaviour and loyalty toward brands are quite widely explored topics in scienti c community, the anti-consumption topic is poorly examined and could still be considered as a fresh subject to study (Lee et al, 2009a; Lee et al, 2009b; Truong et al, 2011) It was only during the last decade that the topic of anticonsumption and one of its components – brand avoidance – a ained more scienti c a ention (Iyer & Muncy, 2009; Kozinets et al, 2010; Lee et al, 2009a; Lee et al, 2009b; Lee et al, 2011). Two most examined approaches in this topic could be distinguished: general anti-consumption targeting reduction of consumption in general and speci c anti-consumption targeting speci c brands only (Kozinets et al, 2010; Lee et al, 2009a). e phenomenon of brand avoidance is ascribable to the la er approach (Lee et al, 2009a; Lee et al, 2009b)

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