Consumer boycotts in brand crises: a brand hate perspective on intensity, attributions and motivations

Purpose This study aims to examine how brand crisis type translates into boycott intention through brand hate and how attributional and motivational patterns differ across hate-intensity levels in digital discourse. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted a sequential explanatory design. Study 1 used a scenario-based experiment (n = 501) to compare ethical and performance-related crises and test brand hate as a mediator, with personality traits and boycott motivations as moderators. Study 2 used netnographic analysis of 5,729 user-generated posts across social media platforms. Findings Ethical crises produced stronger brand hate and boycott intention than performance crises, with brand hate accounting for over half of the total effect. Neuroticism strengthened the crisis type-brand hate relationship, whereas agreeableness did not. In naturally occurring discourse, five antecedent categories of brand hate emerged. Ideological incongruence was most salient, and a distinct indirect category captured hostility extending beyond the focal brand to sponsors, celebrities, sub-brands and political parties. Brand hate was expressed across cold, cool and hot registers and varied by platform; at higher hate intensities, attributional focus was more brand-centred and expressive motivations more prominent than instrumental ones. Originality/value This study shows that crisis-induced brand hate is not a uniform affective state: the crisis type-brand hate relationship is trait-specific, and hate intensity is associated with systematic differences in consumers’ attributional focus and how they justify boycotting. The netnographic study extends and explains the experimental findings.