Emotional Counter-Conditioning of Brand Attitudes

We investigate a situation when a brands’ image suffers from negative emotional associations, such as for the Škoda car brand in the UK, which presumably was associated with embarrassment (Srivastava & Malaviya 2003), or McDonald’s, which might have Advances in Consumer Research (Volume 41) / 69 been associated with disgust after a rumor that its hamburgers contained worm meat. How can such a brand improve its image? Fixing the deficiencies that initially gave rise to the negative emotional associations and communicating these objective improvements is often insufficient (Tybout, Calder, and Sternthal 1981), presumably because the emotional associations linger. Changing the brand name may at times solve the problem, but is often not feasible. From a psychological perspective, is there an alternative?