The effect of adbusting on brands

A new phenomenon has recently been challenging brand managers: adbusting, a form of subversive advertising in which a group or an individual alters existing brand communication (e.g., a billboard ad) to promote social issues (e.g., climate change) or denounce the targeted brand (e.g., its environmental policies). We draw on the hierarchy of effects model to conceptualize the effect of adbusting on consumers and provide empirical evidence that adbusting has ambiguous effects on consumers’ brand perception. On the one hand, the incongruency of the message with consumers’ existing brand schemata raises ad awareness. The effect of an adbust on subsequent cognitive and behavioural outcomes, however, depends on the target of the adbust: if the brand itself is targeted (vs. a social issue), brand perception, word-of-mouth and purchase intention are negatively affected. This negative effect is mitigated if the adbust targets a social issue. In a mixed-method design, we use a panel of real-world adbusts (Study 1) and four experimental studies (Studies 2–5) to shed light on these effects.