Consumers’ Online Brand Attacking and Defending Under Ideological Polarisation: A Case of Cantopop Group “Mirror”

This paper reports the preliminary findings of a netnographic case study that investigates how online brand defending and attacking behaviours are influenced by ideological polarisation. Mirror, a Cantopop group from Hong Kong that pro-Beijing Internet users have targeted, has been selected as the subject of this study. Our preliminary findings show that online brand defending and attacking behaviours for or against a brand may be explained by a modified, looped Belief-Action-Outcome (BAO) framework under ideological polarisation, which complements existing research on Internet users’ impact on brand management and sheds light on politically-driven online brand-attacking behaviours. Results also show that brand-attacking behaviours would further polarise, and thus de-stabilise society. We plan to collect and incorporate further data for more in-depth analyses for building a holistic model to explain the relationships of ideological polarisation on brand defending and attacking behaviours, and their impacts on business and organisation strategies