Monica Grosso – IP 10.01.18

Monica Grosso – IP 10.01.18

I don’t love this brand, actually I hate it… 

The study, in the framework of consumer brand relationship, focuses particularly on negative brand attitudes, precisely on brand hate. The objective is to investigate the origins and the outcomes of hating a brand on the Internet by analysing a real case of brand hate that is the hate expressed toward the Italian brand Trenitalia, the primary train operator in Italy. The subject of the analysis is a Facebook group called “Io odio Trenitalia” – an anti-brand community – whose hateful posts published between 2013 and 2016 constitute the dataset analysed. Precisely, we developed a coding scheme through which we classified and analyzed these posts on the basis of the Triangular Theory of Hate (Sternberg 2003). Then, the posts were analysed using a mixed methodology, namely, a quantitative content analysis combining both qualitative and quantitative tools.