The Impact of Brand Love on Constructive and Defensive e-WOM Intentions of Consumers: The Moderating Role of e-WOM Valence

In today's digital era, electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) is an important communication tool positively or negatively affecting consumer behavior; however, it also poses challenges to firms since they cannot control its creation and dissemination. Brand love, the focus of brand management research in the past years, is known to create consumer loyalty and positive WOM. Therefore, this study aims to understand whether brand love can be a solution to preserve brands from negative e-WOM or augment its reputation with the spread of positive e-WOM. A multi-group experimental design was developed to test the hypotheses on Twitter users. Results show that in the case of positive tweets, the effect of brand love on producing constructive viral reactions is positive. In the case of negative tweets, the effect of brand love on producing defensive viral reactions is not significant. The results also confirm that the components of interpersonal love are valid for the brand love concept, with passion being the strongest.