The effect of activity identity fusion on negative consumer behavior

Matthew Hawkins ()
Additional contact information
Matthew Hawkins: ICN Business School, CEREFIGE - Centre Européen de Recherche en Economie Financière et Gestion des Entreprises - UL - Université de Lorraine

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Negative consumer behavior is an important research topic as it explores consumer behaviors that threaten a brand's image and financial stability. However, prior research offers conflicting findings on whether a strong consumer-brand relationship hurts or protects a brand following a market disruption or brand transgression. In order to offer clarity to this issue, this work argues that disrupting the consumer-activity relationship motivates consumers to re-affirm and protect their identity thereby leading to negative consumer behavior. The data reveal that, following a brand initiated market disruption, consumers with high activity identity fusion are more likely to spread negative word-of-mouth, boycott the brand, and avoid repurchasing the brand in the future. Moreover, the data suggest that high brand identity fusion protects the brand during market disruptions; therefore, prior conflicting results may be due to the fact that the consumer-activity relationship was not accounted for. Theoretically, this work establishes that a consumer's relationship with their consumption activities has significant impacts on consumer behavior. Brand managers and marketers are urged to develop strategies that focus on strengthening the consumer-brand relationship and not the consumer-activity relationship.

Keywords: Brand identity fusion; Consumer-activity relationship; Consumer-brand relationship; Negative consumer behavior; Boycott; Activity identity fusion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mkt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02014635
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Psychology and Marketing, 2019, 36 (4), pp.395-409. ⟨10.1002/mar.21186⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02014635/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02014635

DOI: 10.1002/mar.21186

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().