Can Brands Squeeze Wine from Sour Grapes? The Importance of Self-Esteem in Understanding Envy’s Effects

Brands frequently rely on envy as a means of fostering brand connection and motivating consumer purchase. The current investigation extends recent consumer research in this area, using an interpersonal envy-inducing method to capture envy’s effects on consumers’ brand and product perceptions. We find that while lower self-esteem consumers withdraw from brands when experiencing malicious envy, higher self-esteem consumers preserve or enhance their relationship with an envied brand when experiencing this emotion. As such, while using envy to foster brand relationships and motivate purchase can be successful with higher self-esteem consumers, among lower self-esteem consumers this tactic is likely to prove largely ineffective and may in fact backfire. Finally, we also show that providing external opportunities to self-affirm in ways other than brand or product denigration reduces the negative consequences of envy among low self-esteem consumers.