With the rise of digital media and social platforms, marketers have been presented with unprecedented opportunities for communication and dialogue with their customers.
Over the past two decades, brand communication has evolved from a one-way monologue, controlled entirely by the organisation, to a multi-directional conversation between brands and consumers, but also between consumers themselves.
This shift has fundamentally changed the way companies manage their brands. The loss of control over the narrative has created a persistent anxiety among brand managers, particularly within SMEs, where resources are limited and reputations feel fragile. It took many organisations years to embrace social media as a legitimate communication channel, and for some, the apprehension remains.
At the centre of this apprehension lies a specific and recurring concern: negative comments and the impact they could have on the brand.
In social media management, best practices have evolved considerably. Early guidance urged brands to never delete a comment. More recently, the advice has shifted toward not giving trolls a platform and blocking disruptive users outright. Yet debate persists among marketing practitioners about the most appropriate way to handle online criticism (Scholz & Smith, 2019; Delgado-Ballester et al., 2020).
The reality, as academic research reveals, is more nuanced. How a brand should respond depends on the nature of the criticism, the emotions driving it, and the dynamics it triggers within the broader online community.
The Old Assumption (and Why It Falls Short)
Common thinking frames negative Word of Mouth as harmful, whether it is a bad review on a product page or a critical comment under a social media post. The logic is simple: bad comments lower trust, discourage potential customers, and damage brand equity over time.
This assumption might make sense in an era of static review sites, where a detailed one-star complaint sits permanently next to a product listing. But social media has changed the nature of brand-customer interactions.
Today, brand pages and social media feeds function as rhetorical arenas where consumers express opinions, signal identity, and engage in public debate. In a landscape where consumer attention is the scarce resource, the back-and-forth of online discussion, even when it includes negative comments, absorbs audience attention and expands the total conversation around a brand.
For SMEs willing to engage thoughtfully with criticism rather than suppress it, this represents could represent an opportunity to stay visible without needing a massive advertising budget.
The question, then, is not whether to tolerate negative comments. It is how to use them strategically.
The ADA Framework: How Negativity Actually Works on Social Media
What happens when someone attacks your brand online?
In their 2018 study, Ilhan, Kübler & Pauwels analysed the social media pages of major rival brand pairs (Apple vs. Samsung, Coke vs. Pepsi) and identified a triangular structure of cross-brand interaction: Attack, Defence, and Across (ADA).
When a user posts a negative comment on your brand's page (Attack), it often triggers strong counter‑reactions from loyal supporters (Defence), increasing positive comments and engagement, even though negative comments also grew. The authors also identified a third behaviour: some users post on both rival pages (Across), amplifying the conversation further.
ADA interactions represent only 1% to 6% of total comments on a brand page. Yet across all 10 brands studied, negative comments by rival fans consistently triggered strong counter-reactions from loyal supporters, turning the overall sentiment positive and generating substantial increases in total comment volume.
The numbers are striking. In the case of Apple, Across posts represented just 0.3% of all comments, yet variance decomposition analysis revealed that this tiny fraction was responsible for 36% of Apple's total page volume. For Coke, a single unit increase in Across activity produced a cumulative elasticity of 2.28 on total comment volume, the highest observed across all brands studied.
In other words, the very negativity most managers rush to delete is often the spark that mobilises their most passionate community members and provides disproportionate reach.
Marketing Activities as Trigger and Amplifier
One of the study's most relevant insights for SMEs is the role a brand's own marketing activities play within the ADA dynamic. The researchers found that ADA behaviour is driven by brand-related events: new product introductions, advertising campaigns, and (in some cases) brand crises.
The study quantifies this amplification effect precisely. When Apple announced a new product, the announcement alone (without ADA) generated approximately 796 additional comments over 2 days.
Once the ADA dynamic was activated, the total effect grew to over 3,000 comments sustained over 30 days: nearly four times the volume and fifteen times the duration.
For SMEs, this means marketing activities are not just a means of broadcasting a message. They are conversation starters. A product launch, a piece of content, or a clear public stance on an industry issue can each serve as the trigger for ADA dynamics.
So far, we have clarified the mechanics: negative comments often generate positive sentiment thanks to brand fan defence. But should brands lean into the discussion, or even push it further?
From Defence to Offence: The Escalation Strategy
Research by Scholz and Smith (2019) on the fitness brand Protein World's response to a major social media backlash offers a surprising answer. Instead of apologising and accommodating critics, the brand deliberately escalated the conflict. It retweeted hostile comments, refused to back down, and adopted a snarky, confident tone.
The result was a dualistic framing, "us versus them," where the brand and its supporters became "moral protagonists" and critics became "moral antagonists." It forced consumers to pick a side, and those who sided with the brand became more deeply invested.
This contradicts the most common crisis communication advice: apologise, accommodate, and move on. Scholz and Smith argue that the conventional response works better when a brand has committed a clear, functional failure (a defective product, a service breakdown). But when the backlash is rooted in a moral or ideological disagreement, escalation may be effective and an apology can reinforce the perception of guilt and weaken the brand's positioning.
One specific tactic the researchers identified is "flyting", a ritualised exchange of public banter (similar to how Wendy's famously roasts competitors on Twitter). When a brand uses this kind of "cultural jujitsu," turning an adversary's attack back on them, it provides rhetorical templates that fans copy and deploy on the brand's behalf. The community becomes a distributed defence force.
For SMEs, by analogy, this suggest you do not need Apple's army of loyalists. By cultivating an authentic positioning and engaging with criticism confidently rather than defensively, even a small but passionate community can rally around your brand.
When Fighting Back Can Destroy You
There is a critical distinction to make. The escalation strategy only applies when the backlash is ideological in nature, not when it stems from a genuine business failure that has caused real harm.
Building on Delgado‑Ballester et al.’s findings on anger, dislike, and desire for revenge, we can think in terms of two practical dimensions: perceived severity (how serious is the brand's failure?) and perceived closeness (how personally affected does the consumer feel?).
When both are high, consumers experience intense anger that triggers what the researchers call a "desire for revenge": a felt need to inflict punishment and cause real harm to the brand. This desire for revenge is the engine behind destructive online firestorms.
In practice, these two dimensions give brand managers a diagnostic framework. A product recall, a data breach, or a discriminatory incident will score high on severity. A controversial marketing campaign or a bold industry opinion will not. A local bakery accused of food safety violations will trigger high closeness among community customers because the harm feels personal and immediate. The same accusation directed at a distant multinational may generate criticism, but less visceral outrage.
For SMEs, closeness is particularly important because customers often have a direct, personal relationship with the brand. When both severity and closeness are low (a competitor's fan mocking your latest post, a snarky comment about your pricing), the situation is likely to trigger playful ADA dynamics, and escalation can be deployed safely. When either dimension is elevated, caution is warranted. When both are high, the only viable path is de-escalation and genuine accountability.
Three Actionable Takeaways for SME Leaders and CMOs
1. Monitor the dynamics before you react
Not every negative comment is a crisis. Before responding, observe whether critics are sparking counter-responses from your loyal followers. If so, you are witnessing ADA in action, and it is working in your favour. If, on the other hand, negative comments are met with silence from your community, that absence of defence may indicate a genuine issue that warrants your direct attention. A local consultancy might notice that a provocative LinkedIn post about industry trends generates heated debate that brings new followers. A small e-commerce brand might observe that competitor fans leaving snarky comments drive its own community to post enthusiastic testimonials in response.
2. Assess the emotional temperature before you engage
Read the emotional language in the conversation carefully. Playful rivalry, ideological disagreement, or snarky banter is fertile ground for confident engagement and flyting. Genuine anger, hurt, or a sense of betrayal over something your business did (or failed to do) is fundamentally different. Use the severity and closeness framework: a food brand receiving backlash over a bold sustainability stance can lean into the debate. The same food brand facing anger over a contamination incident must respond with transparency and empathy, not bravado.
3. Design your marketing moments as conversation catalysts.
ADA dynamics do not occur randomly. They are driven by a brand's own marketing activity. Every product launch, content piece, or public stance is an opportunity to set the dynamic in motion. This means integrating ADA logic into the conception and execution of campaigns, not treating it as an afterthought once content is live. Take a clear position on an industry issue. Share a contrarian insight grounded in your expertise. Frame your content around a point of differentiation that clarifies what your brand stands for by making explicit what it stands against. The goal is not to provoke for provocation's sake, but to create content that invites reaction and gives your community something worth defending
Moving Forward
The instinct to protect your brand from negativity is understandable. But the research consistently points toward a more nuanced reality: social media is not a customer service desk. It is a rhetorical arena where identity, loyalty, and attention are constantly negotiated.
For SMEs willing to understand the emotional mechanics behind online conflict, negative comments are not a threat to be eliminated. They are a signal to be read, and, when the conditions are right, a force to be harnessed.
The brands that will thrive are not those with the cleanest comment sections. They are those with the sharpest understanding of when to engage, when to escalate, and when to step back.
Have you experienced negative comments on your brand's social media? Have you ever seen a backlash turn into unexpected engagement? I would love to hear your stories in the comments.
If you like this kind of research-backed marketing insights, subscribe to the newsletter at marclounis.com to get a condensed version every month.
Marc Lounis
Sources
- Ilhan, B.E., Kübler, R.V. and Pauwels, K.H. (2018) ‘Battle of the brand fans: Impact of brand attack and defense on social media’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 35(4), pp. 611–633.
- Scholz, J. and Smith, A.N. (2019) ‘Branding in the age of social media firestorms: How to create brand value by fighting back online’, Journal of Public Affairs, 19(2), e1939.
- Delgado-Ballester, E., López-López, I. and Zafra, E. (2021) ‘Why do people initiate an online firestorm? The role of sadness, anger and dislike’, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 25(3), pp. 329–355.
Photo by Marija Zaric