When Bad Feels Better: How Negative Online Brand Engagement Transforms Into Consumer Happiness

Brands are increasingly prioritizing consumer happiness alongside profit, yet research offers limited guidance on fostering this in negative consumer‐brand contexts. Drawing on the broaden‐and‐build theory, this work models consumer pathways from anti‐consumption and disidentification to negative cognition and affection, to constructive and destructive online behaviors and ultimately happiness. Perceived brand functional underperformance moderates these relationships. The two‐phase exploratory sequential design has a qualitative phase for model development (Studies 1 & 2) and a quantitative phase for model testing through multigroup analysis (Study 3). The findings reveal that anti‐consumption solely predicts negative cognition, while disidentification predicts both negative cognition and affection. Cognition drives constructive and destructive behaviors, whereas affection primarily fuels destructive behaviors. Both behaviors predict happiness, with destructive behaviors being stronger. The study advances understanding of the psychological mechanisms that paradoxically turn negative interactions into enhanced life happiness and identifies severity‐based boundary conditions with implications for recovery design.