Events

Ms. Lingrui (Ling-Ling) Zhou
Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University

Brands often find themselves on the receiving end of negative public feedback from a variety of sources, such as consumers, industry experts, or competitors. Sometimes this feedback can even become insulting or derogatory and has a negative impact on firm success. Typically, brands respond to such degradation by rejecting the insult or ignoring it. This research explores a third strategy: reappropriating the insult. We reveal that reappropriation—an act of intentional self-labeling with an externally-imposed derogatory label—can garner unexpected benefits for brands. Six experiments, including a Facebook advertising field experiment, demonstrate that consumers who witness a brand reappropriate an insult have more positive attitudes towards and more interest in the brand. The advantage of reappropriation is driven by perceptions of mental toughness and specific to situations in which the reappropriated insult is nonmoral in nature and is not perceived to be clearly justified. This work contributes to our understanding of how brands can recover from negative events and provides practical insights for brand managers facing certain types of hostility.