A quantitative exploration of service brand avoidance and its antecedents

With consumers increasingly avoiding service brands due to a wide range of transgressions by organisations, it is surprising that research relating to service brand avoidance is lacking, with most studies focusing on positive brand associations. However, more recently researchers started exploring service brand avoidance by gaining insights into this phenomenon through qualitative research by identifying possible reasons as to why consumers would not only avoid service brands, but also terminate their relationships with brands. This paper furthers our understanding of service brand avoidance by being one of the first research studies to quantitatively explore the antecedents of service brand avoidance. Data were collected by means of convenience sampling from 299 South African cell phone users. Findings indicate that of those antecedents of service brand avoidance identified through previous qualitative studies, identity avoidance, moral avoidance, deficit-value avoidance and experiential avoidance predict service brand avoidance, whereas advertising avoidance does not.