Are negative marketing events evaluated equally: the role of service characteristics and brand positioning

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the impact of brand transgression in a hedonic and utilitarian service industry context. I used expectancy violation theory to show how expectation of brands shift depending on the service context and type of transgression. A total of 483 respondents were recruited from Amazon MTurk. The data was analyzed through MANOVA and ANCOVA. Through 4 studies the results show that niche brands in the hedonic scenario are evaluated negatively following both the communal and agentic transgression. For utilitarian services, the niche brand is evaluated lower following a communal but not an agentic transgression.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10696679.2022.2163906