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Volume 15, Number 8
August 2009

Brand Divorce

Matt Thomson looks at why consumers want to destroy the brands they once loved

When Coca-Cola dropped its original recipe to launch New Coke in 1985, it was overwhelmed by the backlash. The firm was besieged with angry calls and letters, Coke ads were booed at sporting events, and a class action lawsuit was started. A psychiatrist hired by the firm to listen on the phone reported that callers sounded like they had just lost a family member.

Ivey professor Matt Thomson, who studies the interaction of brands, consumer relationships and emotions, remembers the backlash. A Coke drinker himself, he relates to what consumers were going through. “They felt their backs were against the wall. What the company didn’t seem to understand was they were asking the best customers to reinvent themselves. It was a stressful time,” he says.

Firms with strong brands are no strangers to animosity and anger. This comes in many forms, from blogs and lawsuits to threats and vandalism. It may seem paradoxical, but often the people who have the greatest motivation to harm a company are those who were once its most loyal customers. In a study just completed, Thomson and his co-authors Ivey professor Allison Johnson and Maggie Matear, looked at why some people try to destroy the brand they once loved.

In his study, Thomson found that consumers develop two kinds of positive brand relationships. Some consumers become so emotionally attached to a brand that they actually identify with it. Others trust the brand and are loyal to it, but the brand doesn’t become part of their self-identity.

It’s the first class of consumer that represents the greatest potential harm to a company. “The investment of the self in a brand can become a huge liability if the relationship sours,” says Thomson. “Consumers feel that they have lost an important part of who they are, and as a result they have to reconstruct their identity.”

This animosity is well documented in the existing literature, but most research focuses on critical incidents that lead to customer anger. Thomson took a different approach. Through a number of in-depth interviews and surveys, he focused on people’s hostility to particular brands and then determined how that came about.

To his surprise, he found that many people who hated a brand could not point to a critical incident that led to their falling out. “It’s sort of like a marriage going bad over time,” he says. “There was no single moment that stuck out like walking in on a cheating spouse.”

He also found that anger was not usually the primary motivation to get back at the company. “Anger tends to be short-lived,” he says. “Anger explains why people sometimes lash out, but it doesn’t explain why people have long-term animosities against a firm.” Emotions such as embarrassment or shame were more likely to give rise to anti-brand actions, he found. For example, one man in his study felt embarrassed that he was taken in by a deceptive sales technique that he should have recognized. Shame occurs when a person recommends a product to friends who go on to have a bad experience with it.

Thomson also found that extreme anti-brand actions, such as theft or threatening employees, are not likely to be the most damaging. On the other hand, things like negative word of mouth and lawsuits can have a severe effect on the reputation of brands.

The most important lesson for companies is not to take their best clients for granted. “The people who love you are the ones who are most profitable for you, but you have to look after them, like a good marriage,” says Thomson. “When a company knows it is losing a good customer, it needs to make an effort to promote forgiveness.”

Managers are concerned with building a strong brand and measuring the effectiveness of what they do. They tend to focus on the positive, but to accurately assess the equity of your brand, Thomson believes you also have to pay attention to the negative. Firms invest huge sums in their brands, but a few determined consumers can sometimes undo all the hard work.

Managers also have to understand that their brand is made up of different kinds of strong relationships, says Thomson. “A strong identification with your brand is an important indicator of positive brand equity, but it could also foreshadow negative things if you don’t really look after those customers.”

Professor  Thomson's Homepage