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Lookup NU author(s): KC Chandrasapth, Professor Natalia Yannopoulou, Professor Klaus Schoefer, Professor Darren KelseyORCiD
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© 2020, The Academy of Marketing Science.Negative eWOM is becoming an ever more serious threat to brands’ reputations. Dissatisfied consumers increasingly engage in negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) by sharing their complaints in online communities rather than reaching out to the brand with which they have an issue. Brands, in turn, have been ineffective in responding to such complaints. It is also because consumers are inclined to look for answers from their fellow users who they consider more trustworthy due to a lack of commercial motives. As a result, certain consumers take it upon themselves to defend their preferred brand against those attacks. This under-researched phenomenon is becoming of high interest to both theoreticians and practitioners, as brand defence ceases to exclusively rely on the company. The first aim of this research is to examine how negative eWOM arising from customers’ dissatisfaction due to product failure can be mitigated by the collective power of brand defenders in the context of a consumer-organized brand community. The second aim is to identify different characteristics of brand defenders and their adopted strategies. By linking Jung’s (1990) theory of archetypes with consumer-brand defending literature, a Multimodal Discourse-Mythological Approach is proposed to display how the negative eWOM within a Thai online consumer-organized community devoted to Samsung is mitigated. Our findings result in the reconceptualization of the existing binding expectation that companies are solely responsible for the defence and protection of their brands. The negative eWOM is shifted away from relying solely on a company’s responsibility to (re)create a new boundary of what constitutes the fair treatment and legitimate responsibilities that the brand could undertake and what is beyond a brand’s responsibility.
Author(s): Chandrasapth K, Yannopoulou N, Schoefer K, Kelsey D
Editor(s): Wu S; Pantoja F; Krey N
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Marketing Opportunities and Challenges in a Changing Global Marketplace : Proceedings of the 2019 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference
Year: 2020
Pages: 425-426
Print publication date: 16/06/2020
Online publication date: 16/06/2020
Acceptance date: 02/04/2020
Series Title: Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science
Publisher: Springer Nature
Place Published: Berlin
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39165-2_171
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-39165-2_171
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9783030391645
