'Brand victimisation': when consumers are bullied by fellow brand followers in online brand communities

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of a consumer being bullied by a fellow brand follower in an online brand community, which is termed 'Brand Victimisation'. The thesis aims to provide a comprehensive review of the area of brand victimisation in online brand communities. In doing so, it aims to develop a conceptual model which can be used to explain how consumers in online brand communities react to brand victimisation. The thesis further aims to explore the potential negative impact that brand victimisation potentially has on victims (i.e., consumers who are bullied) and the respective brands, as well as to suggest how such negative consequences can be mitigated. Lastly, the thesis aims to provide a model that explains how victims react to being bullied in online brand communities. The thesis sets out to answer the following research questions: (1) What is known about inter-consumer hostility in online brand communities and what remains unexplored and needs to be investigated further? What theoretical models can help to conceptualise brand victimisation as a marketing phenomenon?, (2) What are the potential negative consequences of brand victimisation in online brand communities for victims and brands? and (3) What process do victims undergo when coping with being bullied in online brand communities? To address these research questions, three independent studies were conducted.

Study 1 (Chapter 2) addresses research question 1 by providing an integrative literature review on hostile interactions between consumers and indicates where brand victimisation fits in conceptually as part of the interaction process. The study adopts Lasswell's model of communication (Lasswell 1948) as a guiding theory to conceptualise hostile consumer-to-consumer interaction process and to provide a more comprehensive understanding of brand victimisation. The study contributes to the marketing literature by showing the current state of research in the area, identifying research gaps, conceptualising inter-consumer hostility in online brand communities, and offering avenues for future research.

Study 2 (Chapter 3) addresses research question 2 by conducting a scenario-based experiment to assess how brand victimisation affects three outcome variables, namely a victim's positive word-of-mouth intentions, community satisfaction and community following intentions. Following meta-analytical evidence from the cybervictimisation research, the experiment accounts for two central influences (victimisation severity and bystander reactions) on how victims react to being bullied in online brand communities. The experiment compares the impact of victimisation severity (severely aggressive versus mildly aggressive incident of brand victimisation), and the reactions from bystanders (i.e., other brand followers in the community who witness the victimisation incident) who either defend the victim, reinforce the victimisation or pretend that they do not notice the incident. Using a scenario-based experiment where brand victimisation was manipulated (n=387), the results show that outcomes significantly differ in relation to the severity of victimisation (Severe vs Mild) and the reactions from bystanders (Defending vs Reinforcing vs Pretending). The findings contribute to marketing theory and practice by providing novel insights on the negative effects of brand victimisation on brand- and community-related outcomes. The findings also offer brand managers a better understanding of the undesirable effects of brand victimisation, and on the type of reactions from bystanders that they may like to encourage in order to mitigate such negative consequences.

Study 3 (Chapter 4) addresses research question 3 by adopting the theory of stress and coping (Lazarus and Folkman 1984) as a framework to assess how victims think about, feel about, and cope with brand victimisation. Based on the dataset used in the study 2, 300 respondents were isolated and included in the analysis. The findings show that the severity of brand victimisation (Severe vs Mild) influences a victim's well-being and perception towards company accountability, mediated by a victim's emotional appraisal (anger and fear) and choice of coping strategy (retaliation and avoidance). The results indicate that retaliation and avoidance lead to opposite effects where avoidance strategy leads to lower negative well-being compared to when victims decided to retaliate to the bully. The study is the first to provide an empirically verified framework which illustrates how consumers respond to being bullied in online brand communities. The study contributes by developing and testing an empirical model of brand victimisation as a novel consumer phenomenon within the online brand community literature. The findings add to the limited research on the negative consequences of brand victimisation by demonstrating the detrimental effects of brand victimisation on victims' psychological well-being and perception towards companies that hosted online brand communities on social media. The findings also offer brand managers an understanding about the type of consumer coping strategies that they may like to encourage.

Finally, the thesis concludes by providing a summary about how the findings of Chapter 2-4 are interrelated, as well as links the theoretical and managerial contributions from each chapters thematically into a cohesive whole. The final chapter also summarises the limitations of the research and provides guidance for future research to enhance knowledge in the domain of brand victimisation in online brand communities.

Overall, the thesis contributes to the limited literature on inter-consumer hostility on social media, and particularly the lack of research on the perspective of victims who are bullied by fellow brand followers in online brand communities. It contributes to the online brand community literature by showing the current state of research in the topic area, identifying research gaps - some of which are explored here - and outlining avenues for future research in the domain of brand victimisation in online brand communities. It provides novel insights that highlight the negative impact of being bullied in online brand communities on brand and community-related consequences. It offers an empirical model that conceptualises the interaction process that victims go through when being bullied in online brand communities. It also highlights the importance of situational factors (victimisation severity and bystander reactions), psychological factor (negative emotion) and behavioural factors (coping strategies) on influencing the outcomes of brand victimisation.

Through this thesis companies will gain a better understanding of brand victimisation in online brand communities and on the negative effects that this online phenomenon has on consumers and brands. The empirical evidence about the consequences of how brand victimisation affects victim's perception and behavioural intentions towards brands consequently encourages companies to detect and tackle brand victimisation that occurs in their online brand communities. The findings of this thesis also provide guidance on how, and in what circumstances, companies can mitigate the negative effects of brand victimisation.

The thesis follows a three-paper model, consisting of three separate papers (Chapter 2-4) that conceptualise brand victimisation and explore its consequences. The three papers are embedded in a thesis framework that starts with a general introduction to 'set the scene' (Chapter 1), a literature review on inter-consumer hostility in general and how brand victimisation fits into extant research (Chapter 2), two empirical chapters that explore the consequences of brand victimisation (Chapter 3-4), and a general conclusion of the thesis (Chapter 5).