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The Differential Influence of Identification on Ethical Judgment: The Role of Brand Love

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Abstract

As negative information about companies becomes widely available and spreads rapidly through digital communications, understanding consumer reactions to these events and how human perceptions are shaped becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we investigate how consumers’ identification with brands and their love for them affect their support for the brand during extremely unethical (negative) situations. The results indicate that brand identification both decreases (direct effect) and increases (indirect effect through brand love) consumers’ ethical judgment following extremely unethical events. Moreover, we find that consumers who are in a love type relationship with the brand proactively shield the brand from other consumers by employing two brand supportive behaviors; sin of omission and brand defense.

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Notes

  1. We thank two anonymous reviewers for suggesting these interesting long-term effects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Management, Saint Petersburg State University, Volkhovskiy Pereulok 3, St. Petersburg, Russia, 199004

    M. Deniz Dalman

  2. Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI, 49931-1295, USA

    Mari W. Buche & Junhong Min

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  1. M. Deniz Dalman
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  2. Mari W. Buche
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 8.

Table 8 Results of discriminant validity between the sin of omission and the negative word of mouth
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Appendix 2

See Table 9.

Table 9 Results of comparison between proposed model with rival model
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Dalman, M.D., Buche, M.W. & Min, J. The Differential Influence of Identification on Ethical Judgment: The Role of Brand Love. J Bus Ethics 158, 875–891 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3774-1

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