Companies like Manchester United and Nike host some of the largest online communities on social media to promote their brands. Increasingly, these communities experience incidents of cyberbullying amongst their members. Drawing on research from information studies, psychology, and marketing, we report on observations of eight online brand communities to reveal four conceptual elements – Aggression, Interpersonality, Reinforcing Platform Architecture, and Identity Focus – of consumer brand-cyberbullying (Study 1). Subsequently, we use survey data to show that a key explanation for why consumers who identify with brands bully others lies in their materialistic aspirations, and the extent of this depends on their online community participation, prior cyber-bullying experiences, and brand involvement (Study 2). Our findings provide insights for companies in shaping their policies and interventions to address this problematic behavior of online consumers.
