Negative Double Jeopardy revisited: A longitudinal analysis

Abstract

The Double Jeopardy concept indicates that strong brands have many advantages over weak brands. However, strong brands might also have some disadvantages over weak brands, which were recently conceptualized as Negative Double Jeopardy (NDJ), on the Internet (Kucuk, 2008a). With the advent of the Internet, today's consumers started to re-brand corporate brand meanings on their websites, blogs or social networking spaces, as a part of rising online consumer power. However, previous NDJ and anti-branding studies predominantly focused on anti-brand websites rather than anti-brand blogs and social networking spaces. In addition, although previous studies revealed that there might be a negative link between the levels of consumer-organized anti-branding activities and corporate brand values, this link has not been studied extensively, specifically longitudinally – over an extended time period, such as last 4 years (2005–2009). Thus, this study revisits the NDJ phenomenon with newly developing anti-branding blogs, social networking sites as well anti-branding websites, and tests the validation of previous NDJ studies. In this context, the study is the first of its kind, discussing how such consumer-generated anti-branding activities changed in the last 4 years, with a set of longitudinal analyses in order to address some solutions for better functioning markets.