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1. Introduction
Stronger than a lover’s love is a lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make – Euripides, Medea.
In the famous Greek tragedy by Euripides (431 B.C.E./1993), Medea, wife of Jason, ends up killing her sons and Jason’s new wife to avenge her husband. Aumer’s (2016) interpretation of the classic suggests that Medea’s actions were not purely instigated by Jason’s betrayal alone and that without any love, such inordinate hate is not possible. Social psychology literature supports the notion that positive relationships can lead to negative outcomes when one of the parties in the relationship feels betrayed. For instance, the effect of criticism on an individual is found to be more upsetting when the individual is closely associated with the group criticizing him (Moreland and McMinn, 1999), or if a close relationship exists with the transgressor (McCullough et al., 1998).
In the context of consumer–brand relationship too, prior researches have supported that strong brand relationships can intensify the consumer’s reactions to unfavourable service experiences (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003; Grégoire and Fisher, 2008; Hee et al., 2003; Tax et al., 1998). Various constructs of positive and negative brand relationship have been previously studied independently. There is, however, limited literature exploring these two concepts together, probing to answer under what conditions one could lead to another. Additionally, prior researches have limited themselves to study the behavioural outcomes of perceived betrayal, for example, a desire for revenge or avoidance (Bechwati and Morrin, 2003; Grégoire et al., 2009) or negative word of mouth or vandalism (Johnson et al., 2011), without looking into the emotional disposition that gives rise to such behaviour. To bridge this gap, the current study brings together the concept of brand attachment and brand hate and aims to propose a framework to explain that feelings of betrayal can turn attachment for a brand into hatred, which then culminates into negative word of mouth by the consumer on social media. While doing so, the study also responds to the recommendations made by Zarantonello et al. (2018) to examine the influence of brand relationship constructs on how brand hate may evolve over time.
The study introduces attribution theory (Bettman, 1979) to the brand-hate literature. Attribution theory in consumer–brand relationships provides...