Think about the people in your life who refuse to switch from iPhone to Android, or who would never trade their Samsung for an Apple. For many of them, the phone in their pocket is not just a tool. It is part of how they see themselves, and the rival brand is something close to an enemy. Marketers have long assumed that this kind of “us versus them” energy is good for business. If you love your brand and hate the competitor, surely that makes you a more devoted customer.
A study published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing puts that assumption to the test, and the answer turns out to be more complicated than expected. The researchers found that strong dislike of a rival brand was linked to a lower intention to buy your own preferred brand, not a higher one.
The question behind the research
The work was carried out by D. Todd Donavan of Colorado State University, Brad D. Carlson of Saint Louis University, and Swinder Janda of Kansas State University. Their starting point was a gap in what marketing scholars already knew. Researchers have studied “brand love,” the intense positive attachment people feel toward a favored brand, in great depth. They know it tends to drive loyalty, repeat purchases, and word-of-mouth recommendations.
Far less attention has gone to what the authors call “oppositional brand hate,” meaning negative feelings aimed at a rival brand. The team wanted to know whether these two emotions, love and hate, could emerge at the same time from a single source, and whether they pushed customer loyalty in the same or opposite directions.
That single source is something psychologists call identification. In plain terms, identification is the degree to which a person feels that a brand is part of who they are. It is a thought process more than a feeling, a sense that “this brand and I overlap.” The researchers drew on social identity theory, which holds that people define part of themselves through the groups they belong to, and that belonging to a group often produces both favoritism toward your own side and hostility toward the outside group. Applied to brands, the idea is that strongly identifying with one brand might breed affection for it and animosity toward its competitor at the same time.
How the study was built
The team chose the smartphone market as their testing ground, a category where rivalries run hot and people often weave their devices into their sense of self. They ran an online survey of 445 adult smartphone users in the United States. The sample was split roughly evenly between men and women, with ages ranging from 18 to 77 and a wide spread of incomes.
Each participant first named their own primary phone brand, which became their “focal” brand, and then named a competing brand they saw as its main rival. An iPhone user might point to Samsung, for example, while a Samsung user might point to Apple. This let each person rate love toward the brand they actually use and hate toward a rival that felt personally relevant to them.
Using seven-point rating scales, the survey measured several things: how strongly people identified with their brand, how much they loved it, how much they hated the rival, how authentic they perceived their brand to be, their personal need for uniqueness, and how likely they were to buy the same brand again. Need for uniqueness here is a personality trait, a measure of how much someone wants to stand apart from others through the products they own. The researchers then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling, which lets them test how all these variables relate to one another at once.
What the analysis revealed
The first set of results matched expectations. Identifying strongly with a brand was linked to greater love for it, and that love was strongly linked to a higher intention to buy the brand again. Identification was also linked to more hate toward the rival brand, consistent with the idea that the more you tie a brand to your identity, the more you reject its competitor.
Then came the surprise. The researchers had predicted that hating a rival would strengthen loyalty to one’s preferred brand. Instead, the data showed the opposite. Greater hate toward a rival brand was associated with a lower intention to buy the focal brand. The authors suggest one possible explanation: extreme negative emotion may dampen enthusiasm for the entire product category, leaving people less excited about buying any phone at all.
The team is careful to frame this as a pattern observed in one market rather than a universal law. As they put it, “brand love appears to be the dominant force for driving repeat patronage, while brand hate toward competitors can have nuanced or even unintended outcomes.”
When uniqueness and authenticity change the picture
The study also examined two factors that shift how identification translates into emotion. The first was a person’s need for uniqueness. Among people who identified only weakly with their brand, those with a high need for uniqueness reported noticeably more love for it than those with a low need for uniqueness. The authors suggest these consumers may latch onto a brand that helps them feel distinctive. Among people who already identified strongly with their brand, love stayed high regardless of how much they craved uniqueness.
The second factor was perceived brand authenticity, meaning how genuine, sincere, and true to its values a brand seems. Here the effect showed up in the link between identification and hate toward the rival. When people identified weakly with their brand, seeing it as highly authentic was linked to stronger hate toward the competitor. When the brand seemed less authentic, that hostility faded. Among people who already identified strongly with their brand, the level of authenticity made little difference to how much they disliked the rival. The authors interpret authenticity as a kind of substitute signal that matters most when the personal bond with a brand is still weak.
What it might mean for brands
The researchers draw a practical lesson for marketers, especially in categories with fierce rivalries. They suggest that campaigns built around tearing down a competitor may not pay off and could even backfire by sapping enthusiasm for the whole product category. As they note, “Numerous brands have a rivalry where the brands intentionally bad mouth the competition which may create brand hate for the rival brand. Increasing brand hate may backfire as consumers may turn away from the product category all together.”
Instead, the authors argue that firms are better served by building positive emotional connections, emphasizing authenticity, and helping customers feel that the brand reflects who they are. For audiences that prize standing out, they suggest leaning into exclusivity and distinctiveness rather than mass-community appeals.
A few caveats are worth keeping in mind. The study captured people’s attitudes at a single moment in time, so it cannot prove that one thing causes another, only that these factors move together. It also measured stated intention to buy rather than actual purchases, and it focused on a single product category in one country. The authors note that smartphones have unusual features, such as locked-in technology ecosystems, that may not carry over to other markets. They call for future work across different industries and cultures to see whether this love-hate asymmetry holds up more broadly.
Still, the central takeaway is straightforward. In this market, love did the heavy lifting, while hate quietly worked against the very loyalty it was supposed to reinforce.
