(Un) forgiveness in brand hate

Abstract

Brand hate is a new concept that has been under scrutiny in brand relationship and consumer emotion research. Upon the previous efforts to determine and measure determinants and outcomes of brand hate, this study first aims at providing further analysis of these components by structural equation modeling. Second, this study seeks for conditions that likely to bring a forgiving state to a hater consumer. The conditions investigated here are quality of consumer-brand relationship, trait forgivingness of consumer and composition of brand hate. Following the previous hate and brand hate research,six primary emotions of hate are assessed in forgiveness context, for the first time. The novel contribution is the introduction of a dispositional factor (forgivingness) to be measured against hate and forgiveness states. In order to picture relationships between brand hate, forgiveness state, forgivingness and brand relationship, this study embraces a quantitative (descriptive) approach and utilizes a large-scale survey (n = 225). Analysis of the survey data presented the existence, type, direction and effect size of these relationships. Density of brand hate, composition of hate and brand relationship quality reflects in forgiveness state while forgivingness has no influence on forgiveness.