The moderating role of perceived brand globalness on the effects of consumers’ attitude during periods of political controversies: three interconnected studies following marketing analytics’ best practices

The purpose of this research is to test the moderating role of perceived brand globalness (PBG) on consumer unfavourable attitudes and buying intention towards brands associated with a conflicting political belief. Three studies were conducted. Study 1 (N = 228) examines the effect of a brand being associated with a conflicting political belief on attitude and buying intention. Study 2 (N = 212) tests the moderating role of PBG among these relationships. Study 3 (N = 126) tests the moderating role of PBG for a service brand and adds the mediating role of self-congruity. We followed marketing analytics best practices to examine causal effects of manipulated stimuli. We also examined the psychometric characteristics of the data-collection tool and tested direct relationships between variables. Additionally, we used percentile bootstrap confidence intervals, with PROCESS-Macro, to test mediating effects in the theoretical model. The studies include moderating analyses and analysis of variance. The results show that the association of a brand with a conflicting political belief negatively influences perceived self-congruity, which leads to an unfavourable attitude and, in turn, to a lower buying intention. Presenting a brand as global mitigates such unfavourable effects. The moderating effect of PBG is confirmed for a tangible product and for a service brand.