Identifying and Prioritizing Types of Brand Violations and Consumers’ Reactions to Brand Violations Using the FCM Method (Case Study: Food Industry)

Despite the importance of brand and branding for companies and organizations, some factors can lead to value decrease and destruction of the brand’s image in the eyes of customers. One of these factors is brand violations that company managers should always seek to control and adjust these types of violations in order to prevent damage caused by them. Therefore, the present research was conducted with the aim of studying the types of brand violations and identifying consumers’ reactions to them. This research is applied in terms of purpose, and in terms of data collection method it is survey and exploratory, and it has a comparative and inductive research philosophy. The statistical population of the research consists of experts including marketing managers of food companies whose sample members were selected using the purposeful sampling method, based on the principle of theoretical saturation. The data collection tool is interview in the qualitative part and questionnaire in the quantitative part. The validity and reliability of the tools were analyzed using content validity and intra-coder inter-coder reliability for the interview and content validity and test-retest reliability for the questionnaire respectively. In this research, content analysis and coding methods were used in the qualitative part and fuzzy cognitive map method in the quantitative part for data analysis. The findings of the qualitative part include identifying the types of brand violations and consumers’ reactions to them, and the findings of the quantitative part are the prioritization of these factors. In this regard, the most important brand violations in the food industry are brand production violations in the form of violations before production and violations in the production process, which is shown in the form of using low-quality raw materials, supplying non-standard goods or services, violation in the assembly process and using expired raw materials. Also, the most common behavioral reaction of consumers is shown in the form of brand hatred and brand disgust.