The Dark Side of Brand-Based Online Communities: The Role of Culture

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed significant contributions from scholars extending the literature on online brand communities (OBC’s). Built on technology-mediated communication, OBC’s are specialized, non-geographically bound member groups of brand admirers and customers (Muniz & O’guinn, 2001). Symbolic to the fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated, online communities (McAlexander et al., 2002) manifest a high degree of connectedness with fellow members and the brand in question (Algesheimer et al., 2005). Members have diverse motivations to participate in an OBC, leading to conversations around their experiences, interactions, and brand usage, eventually leading to customer-generated value and word-of-mouth publicity. These conversations are somewhere symbolic of the members’ loyalty, trust, and purchase intentions. Acknowledging the same, brands take the online community route to drive customer engagement (Dessart et al., 2015). Since the introduction of the idea of brand community by Muniz & O’guinn (2001), studies have extensively explored and examined the positive perspectives on online brand communities (OBCs). These studies have primarily focused on examining member’s participatory behaviors and motivations to join an online brand community giving limited attention and focus to the dark side of community engagements. Not lovers always, customers are brand haters too. Consumer-owned communities formed by these brand haters are outcomes of retaliatory behaviors, originating from a bad experience with the brand. Such anti-brand communities propagate brand hate through speeches, conversations, derogatory remarks against the targeted brand. A noteworthy contribution in the field of the dark side is from Krishnamurthy and Kucuk (2009), addressing anti-branding and anti-consumption. Kucuk (2016, 2019, 2020) adds credence by exploring online consumer power, brand hate, and reverse (brand)anthropomorphism to advance the investigation. Despite the recent interest, the concept still lacks detailed exploration and a comprehensive examination. A very significant perspective missing in the published work is the role of culture in understanding and explaining the conflicts, rivalries, and schadenfreude amongst community members. The global nature of online-brand communities has been established to initiate a rich exchange of information. Still, this globality can also lead to rivalries emerging out of multi-representations of different cultures and nationalities. Some studies (Chandrasapth et al., 2021; Han & Nam, 2019; Husemann & Luedicke, 2013) have suggested exploring the transgressive conflicts in OBCs through the lens of culture, but there exists no significant work. It is critical to uncover the role of culture in providing answers to dark behaviors like cyber frauds, cyberloafing, over engagements, trolling, to name a few. How culture affects the very nature of the conflicts and what role does it play in how actors involved react to these conflicts is a pertinent and crucial view to be questioned and investigated. Also, research to understand the position of culture in