Brand hate and consumer resistance behaviors in the fast food industry: Evidence from Vietnam

Brand hate has emerged as a high-arousal negative emotion that underlies a range of hostile consumer responses, yet empirical evidence remains fragmented regarding how appraisal-based evaluations, hostile affect, and resistance behaviors are jointly related, particularly outside Western contexts. Addressing this gap, the present study examines the associative structure linking negative past experience, ideological incompatibility, and rumor exposure with brand hate, and explores how brand hate is related to negative word-of-mouth (NeWOM) intensity and consumer resistance behaviors in the fast-food context in Vietnam. Drawing conceptually on Expectation–Confirmation Theory and Equity Theory as appraisal-based frameworks, the study adopts a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design. Data were collected from 340 self-identified brand-hating fast-food consumers in an urban Vietnamese setting and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that negative past experience, ideological incompatibility, and rumor exposure are all positively associated with brand hate, with ideological incompatibility exhibiting the strongest association. Brand hate, in turn, shows a strong positive association with NeWOM intensity, which is further associated with both consumer boycott and consumer–brand sabotage intentions. By situating brand hate within a broader pattern of socially mediated resistance behaviors, the findings highlight NeWOM intensity as an intermediate regulatory mechanism linking hostile affect with punitive consumer responses. Rather than advancing causal or escalation-based claims, this study provides context-sensitive empirical evidence that extends established brand hate frameworks to an emerging market service context. The results contribute to a more nuanced psychological understanding of consumer retaliation by clarifying how hostile emotions are embedded in communicative and symbolic forms of resistance rather than direct confrontation.