Consumers may not be fully aware of the level of personalization used in brand placements in digital advertising. Personalized brand placements use customer data to select and insert preferred brands into digital media content, such as having Coke appear in a YouTube video for someone who favors Coca-Cola. This personalization can enhance the consumer experience (Trifts & Aghakhani, 2018) but may also backfire if placements don't account for changes in brand preference or when personalized placements are co-consumed with a person whose preferences strongly diverge from one’s own (e.g., one’s romantic partner; Brick, Fitzsimons, Chartrand, & Fitzsimons, 2018). Brands have a significant impact on how people perceive each other. Brands convey social information and symbolic meaning (Keller, 1993; Levy, 1959) and can influence behavior (e.g., Fitzsimons, Chartrand, & Fitzsimons 2008) and provide a source of affiliation (Escalas & Bettman, 2003). However, less is known about how brands affect basic social connections like empathy. This notable gap is relevant to the evaluation of the impact of brand placements in digital advertising as brand logos are quite visible in brand placements and can be the first piece of information someone observes when forming an attitude towards another person. For example, imagine an Instagram post of a person wearing a Harley Davidson baseball cap. What kind of person did you imagine? Does your impression change if, instead, the brand was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or the Trump Organization? Moreover, how likely would you be to engage with media showcasing a person supporting this brand. In the current research, we propose that personally disliked brands create a negative bias in person perception and consumer judgment, a phenomenon we coin “brand negativity bias.” Our results show that disliking a brand can reduce empathy for others and substantially bias attitudes toward a digital product associated with but not created by the brand. Specifically, we show process evidence that suggests disliked brand placements reduce (1) empathy toward others through reductions in perceived similarity and (2) attitudes toward a digital product through perceived similarity and empathy, as serial processes. In addition, although we do not empirically test an overall mechanism that explains the negativity bias in its entirety, we speculate several reasons that underlie the broad influence of personally disliked brands (e.g., symbolic, ideological, or moral). From a societal point of view, our findings inform the public to be mindful of how simple consumption cues can bias people’s decision making, which holds implications beyond consumer judgment in domains involving first impressions.

How much do you like a person who loves the brands you hate? We investigated an effect we call the brand negativity bias, which occurs when an unfavorable brand reduces the attitudes toward an associated target product or person. Using a person perception paradigm in the context of brand placements, Experiment 1 established that unfavorable brands reduced attitudes toward a new digital product (i.e., a movie) in which the brand was placed. Experiment 2 showed this effect was driven by a reduced ability to connect with the character in the movie who was associated with an unfavorable brand in two serial processes (lower perceived similarity leading to lower empathy). These results provide the first evidence showing how unfavorable brands can reduce empathy between people. Supporting the brand negativity bias, we found that unfavorable brands yielded stronger effects across every evaluative outcome suggesting that unfavorable brands held more influence over consumer judgment compared to favorable brands. Lastly, these results add a layer of complexity to B2B partnerships and tell a cautionary story of when unfavorable brand associations transfer between entities.