Kalendarium

MMTC Seminar with guest Kieran Tierney: Measuring customer grief in brand relationships

MMTC Seminar with guest Kieran Tierney, RMIT University

Title: Measuring customer grief in brand relationships

Brands are key to building customer-brand relationships. Despite this, organisations change their product lines by removing favoured brands, thereby disrupting these relationships.  This results in negative customer emotions, including pain and grief, which manifest in behavioural outcomes such as negative word-of-mouth, erosion of trust, and avoidance.

While there are established scales in psychology, grief remains relatively unexplored and fragmented in marketing and branding. Without measurement, brand studies risk capturing only partial manifestations of grief, resulting in inconsistent empirical findings and obscuring how grief shapes brand relationships, loyalty trajectories, and post-loss consumer behaviour, thereby impacting marketing management decisions. To address this, this study seeks to develop a customer grief measurement scale, given the impact of brand removals on customer-brand relationships.

This study used a quantitative approach comprising three studies conducted using data collected on Prolific. We present a reliable scale for measuring customer grief, its behavioural outcomes, and implications for hedonic and utilitarian brands.

Join us: B6046, JIBS or Online via zoom (contact for link)

About the presenter: Kieran’s research focuses on qualitative explorations of service interactions, with a particular emphasis on advancing knowledge in service branding, management and B2B marketing. His work aims to bridge the gap between academic insights and practical applications, contributing to both scholarly literature and industry practice.