PROACTIVE VS. REACTIVE STRATEGIES: DESIGNING SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING TO MINIMIZE BRAND HATE RISK

Abstract

This study is aimed at investigating the relationship amid social media strategy advertising and brand hate, and it will dig deep to examine the mediation role of the moral outrage. A theoretical model of proactive and reactive advertising strategies as independent variables is tested with the issues according to a survey data of 234 social media users using the regression and mediation analysis. The findings indicate that proactive advertising techniques are effective in reducing both moral outrage and brand hate significantly and reactive responses to crisis indicate the positive relationship between these two factors with negative consequences. Moral outrage was a significant predictor of brand hate and a mediator that explained 38.2 and 40.4 percent of the total impact of proactive and reactive policies on brand hate respectively. The results prove the utmost importance of prevention strategies in advertisement design, and the implication is that preventative measures such as ethical screening and cultural sensitivity test could contribute to an extent in minimizing the risk of eliciting moral outrage and subsequent brand hate. Such lessons can be extremely useful to any marketer who is trying to navigate the obstacles of social media advertisement in a consumer world that is increasingly sensitive.