From brand hate to behavioral response: A recourse-contingent exit-voice-loyalty-neglect framework for digital consumer markets

Three decades of brand hate research have mapped what triggers consumer hate and catalogued how hateful consumers respond, avoiding, switching, complaining, retaliating, subverting, without connecting these two halves through one behavioral logic. This paper closes that gap by importing the Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Neglect (EVLN) framework into the brand hate domain and extending it with a boundary condition the literature has ignored: structural recourse availability. Brand hate's dimensional profile, whether anger, contempt, aversion, or fear dominates, depends on whether its trigger is relational (betrayal, transgression, ideological incompatibility) or structural (algorithmic, platform-based, institutional unfairness), and this profile sets a default EVLN response tendency. Whether that tendency is realized depends on structural recourse, the inverse of switching costs, platform dependence, and powerlessness. When recourse is blocked, Exit tendencies redirect toward Voice where a channel exists, and toward Neglect, termed informed helplessness, where none does. We develop eight propositions specifying this redirection process, including a measurement-validity proposition showing informed helplessness is indistinguishable from loyalty in standard satisfaction measures, and a release proposition explaining how dormant hate resurfaces when conditions change. The framework helps managers and policymakers identify trapped haters and sets an agenda for measuring them.