Antecedents and Consequences of Brand Hate Among Netizens: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam

In the era of tough competition, the customer's emotional attachment to brand plays a vital role to the successes and failures of enterprises. Specifically in the case of doing business online, brands have to cope with the troubles of rising from brand hate as brand avoidance, negative word of mouth and brand retaliation. Traditionally, the brand communication is very hard to control and with online communities, the problems tend to be even more severe. This paper aims to explore and discuss the core concept, the driven factors and the actionable consequences of brand hate among netizens. A total of 358 valid responses were obtained from surveys taken from the internet users across the nation. Partial Least Square - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was conducted using Smart PLS to assess the hypotheses. The result shows that the expression of brand hate among netizen consists of active hate and passive hate. Deficit value, deceptive advertising, negative past experience and ideology incompatibility have been confirmed as influencing factors on customers' brand hate emotion. Then brand hate itself causes the customer's actionable outcomes such as brand avoidance, brand negative word of mouth and brand retaliation. Along with the theoretical contributions and managerial implications have been recommended for enterprises to avoid netizens' brand hate.