This chapter aims to understand the relationship between the concept of negative customer engagement and Brand Hate and is one of the first to analyse this relationship. In addition, it examines whether the negative emotions of frustration, stress, fear, boredom, and sadness mediate this relationship. This chapter contributes to the study of negative brand-consumer relationships, responding to the research need to contribute more knowledge to the negative valence of customer engagement and brand hate. This study uses structural equation modelling to analyse a unique context, 400 ski and snowboard athletes. The results show how negative customer engagement significantly influences brand hate, mediated by the emotions of frustration, stress and sadness, as opposed to what previous literature suggests.
Top1. Introduction
This chapter analyses the negative relationship between how negative customer engagement influences five specific negative emotions (frustration, fear, sadness, boredom, and stress) and how these are related to activating brand hate in extreme snow sports (skiing/snowboarding) users (see Appendix A for further explanation of these key terms).
Customer engagement has received significant interest in the literature in recent years (Do et al., 2020; Naumann et al., 2019; Yadav et al., 2023) due to its positive implications in building brand-consumer relationships (Hollebeek, 2011; Khan et al., 2016). Therefore, it is considered a significant brand relationship variable (Kumar and Nayak, 2019; Fetscherin et al., 2021) since it involves different commitments from the consumer, understood as time, energy, and money (Kumar and Nayak, 2019) that culminate in significant benefits for companies (Do et al., 2020).
Engagement can be represented with positive and negative valence (Naumann et al., 2020; Do et al., 2020; Higgins and Scholer, 2009). Although it is essential to understand its negative side, it must be sufficiently analysed in the scientific literature (Yadav et al., 2023; Do et al., 2020; Naumann et al., 2020). Negative customer engagement has an impact on people that is more determinant than positive engagement (Sinclair et al., 2015; Do et al., 2020), as consumers pay more attention to negative brand-consumer interactions, directly influencing their purchase decision (Yadav et al., 2023). Furthermore, negative engagement can be triggered by unfavourable thoughts, feelings and behaviours towards a brand (Hollebeek and Chen, 2014; Naumann et al., 2017), which can cause consumers to distance themselves from the brand (Rodrigues et al., 2021) and develop negative emotions due to a progressive increase in aversions caused by different disappointments perceived by the individual (Casidy and Shin, 2015). In this chapter, we analyse the influence of negative customer engagement on extreme snow sports and snow sports users. This motivation stems from the tremendous economic and social implications of the extreme sports industry in recent years (Brymer et al., 2020; Raggiotto et al., 2020). Also, due to the limited research conducted about anti-brand behaviors in consumers within a sports context (Aziz and Rahman, 2022; Walter et al., 2023), despite the latent demand to understand these behaviors in contexts still scarcely analyzed (Rahimah et al., 2023; Walter et al., 2023; Aziz and Rahman, 2022; Zhang and Laroche, 2020).