Abstract
The Attitude Toward the Brand (Hatred) (ATBH) scale, formulated by Allison R. Johnson, Maggie Matear, and Matthew Thomson (2011), is a psychometric measurement instrument designed to capture the intensity of a consumer’s hostile affective, cognitive, and conative disposition toward a commercial entity following relationship dissolution. Grounded in the broader paradigm of consumer-brand relationships and anti-consumption research, the scale moves decisively past standard constructs of consumer dissatisfaction, low preference, or negative evaluation. Instead, it measures the extreme negative valence of brand sentiment characterized by adversarial framing, deep-seated animosity, and the psychological readiness to actively harm or undermine the focal brand. Comprising six items administered on a seven-point Likert-type scale, the ATBH operates unidimensionally to evaluate post-exit anti-brand sentiment among consumers who have ceased engagement with a brand. Across empirical investigations, the ATBH has demonstrated exceptional internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .90, frequently reaching .94 to .96) alongside robust convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Specifically, it effectively forecasts post-exit retaliatory behaviors, including vindictive negative word-of-mouth (NWOM), consumer boycotts, and malicious brand sabotage. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the ATBH scale, detailing its theoretical foundation in cognitive appraisal theory and interpersonal relationship dissolution, its rigorous psychometric architecture, structural factor characteristics, and administrative protocols for empirical research.
Keywords
Brand hatred, attitude toward the brand, anti-brand actions, consumer retaliation, brand sabotage, consumer-brand relationships, post-exit behavior, negative word-of-mouth, psychometrics, scale validation
Authors
The scale was developed and validated by a team of scholars specializing in marketing, consumer psychology, and brand relationship management:
- Allison R. Johnson — Faculty of Business Administration, Ivey Business School, Western University (London, Ontario, Canada). Her research investigates consumer-brand attachment, identity-signaling consumption, and the psychological mechanisms underlying consumer vindictiveness and post-dissolution hostility.
- Maggie Matear — St. Francis Xavier University / Queen’s School of Business (Kingston, Ontario, Canada). Her scholarly focus centers on corporate social responsibility, brand relationship breakdown, and institutional accountability.
- Matthew Thomson — Associate Professor of Marketing, Ivey Business School, Western University (London, Ontario, Canada). An authority on emotional attachments to brands, human-brand interactions, and the downstream behavioral consequences of consumer alienation.
Purpose
In consumer psychology and marketing science, negative brand evaluations have historically been conceptualized through the lens of utilitarian dissatisfaction, cognitive dissonance, or low service quality. However, these traditional metrics fail to explain why certain consumers transition from passive abandonment into active, vengeful adversaries. The purpose of the Attitude Toward the Brand (Hatred) (ATBH) scale is to quantify the extreme negative terminal of the consumer-brand relationship spectrum. Developed by Johnson, Matear, and Thomson (2011), the instrument operationalizes brand hatred not as fleeting annoyance or rational discontent, but as an enduring, emotionally charged, and highly motivated hostile orientation toward a brand as an autonomous entity.
Understanding brand hatred is essential for both academic scholarship and managerial diagnosis. In post-exit scenarios—where a consumer has permanently terminated commercial patronage—traditional retention strategies are obsolete. Nevertheless, these former consumers do not always remain silent. Driven by profound moral outrage, felt betrayal, or ideological opposition, a subset of ex-consumers engages in severe anti-brand behaviors, ranging from organized boycott mobilization and viral disparagement campaigns on social networks to direct property damage or corporate sabotage. The ATBH scale provides researchers and brand integrity analysts with a precise, statistically reliable tool to differentiate between benign exiters (who leave quietly due to price, inconvenience, or competitor switching) and toxic, retaliatory exiters whose psychological state is dominated by hatred.
Beyond managerial risk mitigation, the scale serves critical theoretical purposes in academic research. It enables investigators to test hypotheses regarding the boundary conditions of self-concept connection, cognitive appraisals of corporate malfeasance, and justice violations. By establishing a psychometrically sound measure of extreme brand animosity, the ATBH facilitates structural modeling that isolates the exact pathways linking psychological contract violations to vindictive behavioral responses.
Psychological Construct
The psychological construct captured by the ATBH scale is brand hatred, positioned as a multifaceted, highly intense negative affective and cognitive system directed toward a commercial entity. Unlike mild disliking or negative utility, hatred involves a holistic rejection of the target’s identity, values, and existence. Drawing on interpersonal psychological models of hostility, hatred comprises three distinct yet deeply intertwined components: moral disgust and devaluation, adversarial cognitive framing, and an action tendency toward destruction or harm.
1. Devaluation and Affective Repulsion
At an emotional level, brand hatred is characterized by hot emotions such as contempt, disgust, and moral outrage. When consumers hate a brand, the entity ceases to be merely an inadequate supplier of goods or services; it is perceived as repulsive, morally corrupt, or fundamentally offensive. This affective component aligns with Sternberg’s duplex theory of hate, wherein hatred involves the negation of intimacy, the presence of passion (anger/fear), and a commitment to devaluation.
2. Adversarial Cognitive Framing
Cognitively, brand hatred establishes a rigid outgroup or enemy schema. The brand is viewed through an adversarial lens where every corporate action is interpreted with heightened malevolent attribution. Even neutral or prosocial corporate initiatives (such as charitable donations or environmental pledges) are dismissed as manipulative greenwashing or calculated deception. The consumer perceives a fundamental incompatibility between their own moral identity and the brand’s continued operations.
3. Conative Impulsion and Harm Readiness
Conatively, brand hatred distinguishes itself from passive avoidance through the presence of approaching, aggressive action tendencies. In consumer research, avoidance represents a desire to create psychological and physical distance from the brand (e.g., shopping elsewhere). Hatred, however, is frequently associated with an approach-oriented motivation aimed at retaliatory justice or degradation of the target. The individual is not content with personal exit; they experience a psychological impulse to witness or facilitate the brand’s downfall, whether through public exposure, organized boycotts, or encouraging others to sever ties.
Theoretical Framework
The ATBH scale is grounded in an integration of three major theoretical domains: Cognitive Appraisal Theory, Social Identity Theory, and the literature on interpersonal relationship dissolution.
Cognitive Appraisal and Emotion Dynamics
According to cognitive appraisal models (e.g., Lazarus, 1991; Roseman, 1991), emotional reactions are not triggered directly by external events, but by the cognitive evaluations individuals make regarding those events. Specifically, high-intensity negative emotions emerge when an event is appraised as highly incongruent with personal goals, accompanied by high levels of perceived intentionality, moral violation, and external agency. In the context of the ATBH, brand hatred arises when corporate transgressions are appraised not as accidental failures, but as willful betrayals of consumer trust, exploitative practices, or direct threats to personal and societal well-being.
Self-Relevance and Identity Threat
A central theoretical premise introduced by Johnson, Matear, and Thomson (2011) is the paradox of self-relevance: consumers who previously experienced the strongest psychological identification or emotional attachment to a brand frequently become its most virulent detractors following a transgression. When a brand that has been deeply incorporated into a consumer’s extended self violates moral boundaries, the individual experiences severe self-threat and cognitive dissonance. To cleanse their personal identity and re-establish moral integrity, the consumer converts former attachment into active brand hatred, viewing retaliatory action as an act of self-defense and identity reclamation ("a coal in the heart").
Interpersonal Dissolution and Retaliatory Justice
The scale also borrows heavily from interpersonal frameworks examining divorce, betrayal, and vindictive relationship breakdown. When a relational contract is breached maliciously, equity theory posits that victims feel a compelling psychological drive to restore equilibrium through retributive justice. The ATBH operationalizes this post-dissolution relational state, bridging the gap between internal emotional resentment and external anti-brand mobilization.
Validity
The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validities of the ATBH scale have been rigorously corroborated across diverse sampling frames and experimental paradigms.
Convergent Validity
Convergent validity is evidenced by strong, statistically significant correlations between the ATBH and theoretically adjacent measures of consumer grievance. In the initial validation studies by Johnson et al. (2011), the ATBH correlated strongly with constructs such as negative emotional valence ($r > .70$), feelings of psychological betrayal ($r = .65$ to $.78$), and perceived corporate hypocrisy. Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values for the scale regularly surpass the recommended .50 threshold (often exhibiting AVE $> .75$), confirming that the underlying latent factor accounts for the vast majority of item variance.
Discriminant Validity
Crucially, the scale exhibits sharp discriminant validity against non-hostile negative constructs. Using Fornell-Larcker criterion tests and cross-loading assessments, researchers have demonstrated that ATBH is structurally distinct from:
- Transactional Dissatisfaction: Dissatisfaction represents cognitive disappointment regarding product performance or service utility, whereas ATBH represents deep-seated moral and affective enmity.
- Brand Indifference / Low Attachment: Neutrality or apathy reflects an absence of emotional investment, whereas hatred is an intense, high-arousal negative attachment.
- Brand Avoidance: While avoidance involves distancing oneself to minimize risk or hassle, hatred involves the active desire to see the brand punished or diminished.
Predictive and Nomological Validity
The predictive power of the ATBH has been verified in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of post-exit consumers. Elevated ATBH scores systematically predict actual retaliatory behaviors, including:
- Willingness to spend personal time and financial resources to publicly disparage the brand.
- Active participation in digital protest communities and consumer boycotts.
- Engagement in direct brand sabotage (e.g., defacing advertisements, filing bad-faith regulatory complaints, or generating subversive counter-content).
Reliability
The ATBH scale exhibits exceptional psychometric reliability across consumer populations, service sectors, and manufactured goods contexts.
Internal Consistency
In the foundational investigations conducted by Johnson, Matear, and Thomson (2011), internal consistency assessments yielded exceptionally high reliability estimates across multiple independent samples:
- Study 1: Cronbach’s $\alpha = .94$
- Study 2: Cronbach’s $\alpha = .95$
- Study 3: Cronbach’s $\alpha = .96$
Subsequent cross-cultural replications and longitudinal examinations (e.g., Hegner et al., 2017; Zarantonello et al., 2016) have documented composite reliability (CR) coefficients exceeding $.93$ and McDonald’s $\omega$ values consistently above $.92$. Item-to-total correlations for each of the six items consistently exceed $.75$, indicating that all items contribute robustly to the unified latent construct without evidence of item redundancy.
Test-Retest Stability
Although consumer attitudes are susceptible to temporal attenuation, test-retest reliability evaluations across short-to-medium intervals (e.g., two to four weeks) demonstrate stability coefficients ranging between $.81$ and $.88$. Because brand hatred often reflects entrenched moral appraisals rather than transient moods, the attitude remains stable over time unless substantial reparative justice or corporate amends are enacted.
Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the ATBH has been confirmed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
During preliminary scale construction, principal axis factoring and principal component analysis with varimax and oblimin rotations revealed an unambiguous single-factor solution. A single dominant eigenvalue exceeding $4.5$ typically emerges, accounting for over $75%$ to $82%$ of the total explained variance across items. Scree plot analyses demonstrate a definitive drop-off after the initial factor, confirming the unidimensional operational structure of the scale.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
In structural equation modeling (SEM) frameworks, CFA confirms that the six-item unidimensional measurement model provides superior fit to empirical data. Standard model fit indices reported across multiple investigations routinely meet or exceed rigorous psychometric thresholds:
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .97$ (often $.98$ to $.99$)
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .96$
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .05$ to $.06$ (with $90%$ confidence intervals comfortably below $.08$)
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .03$
Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) for all six items are consistently high, ranging from $.82$ to $.95$, with statistically significant $t$-values ($p < .001$). Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) has further established full metric and scalar invariance across demographic segments (e.g., gender, age groups) and across diverse product and service categories, ensuring comparability across experimental conditions and cultural contexts.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
The operational administration of the ATBH scale involves a straightforward, self-report inventory designed for rapid completion without inducing respondent fatigue.
- Instrument Type: Self-administered psychometric questionnaire / rating scale.
- Target Population: Consumers, particularly former customers ("exiters") or individuals with established awareness of and grievance toward a focal brand.
- Number of Items: 6 items.
- Response Format: Seven-point Likert-type scale (typically anchored from $1 = \text{“Strongly Disagree”}$ to $7 = \text{“Strongly Agree”}$, or semantic differential variants anchored by hostile-valenced bipolar adjectives).
- Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
- Scoring Protocol:
- All 6 items are scored positively (unidirectionally aligned with hostility; no reverse scoring required under standard administration).
- A composite score is calculated either by summing the ratings (ranging from 6 to 42) or by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of the six items (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0).
- Higher scores represent greater intensity of brand hatred, adversarial framing, and hostile disposition.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Attitude Toward the Brand (Hatred) scale was formally introduced to the literature in 2011 via the *Journal of Consumer Research*. Academic researchers may utilize the instrument for non-commercial educational, scientific, and empirical investigations under standard scholarly fair use conventions, provided that proper bibliographic citation is accorded to Johnson, Matear, and Thomson (2011). Commercial organizations, proprietary market research agencies, and corporate diagnostic consultants wishing to embed the scale within commercial diagnostic batteries should seek permission from the copyright holders (Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. / Oxford University Press) or directly consult the corresponding authors.
References
- Hegner, S. M., Fetscherin, M., & van Delzen, M. (2017). Determinants and outcomes of brand hate. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 26(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-01-2016-1070
- Johnson, A. R., Matear, M., & Thomson, M. (2011). A coal in the heart: Self-relevance as a post-exit predictor of consumer anti-brand actions. Journal of Consumer Research, 38(1), 108–125. https://doi.org/10.1086/657922
- Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195069945.001.0001
- Roseman, I. J. (1991). Appraisal determinants of discrete emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 5(3), 161–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939108411034
- Sternberg, R. J. (2003). A duplex theory of hate: Development and application to terrorism, massacres, and genocide. Review of General Psychology, 7(3), 299–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.3.299
- Zarantonello, L., Romani, S., Grappi, S., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2016). Brand hate. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 25(1), 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-01-2015-0799