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The proliferation of fake news
Creating and disseminating false information about brands is nothing new, and brands have a long history of dealing with false claims and rumors. In the mid-1970s, shortly after General Motors introduced the Chevrolet Nova into the Mexican market, rumors abounded that sales were suffering because when said out loud, the words no va translated to “doesn’t go” in Spanish (Kohli, 1997). Although in reality sales were plentiful in Spanish-speaking markets and the rumor was false, to this day, the example – which paints GM executives as unprepared and uneducated about foreign market entry – lives on in peoples’ memory and in countless marketing textbooks. In 1996, a rumor started that designer Tommy Hilfiger declared, during an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, that he wished people of color would not wear his clothes. In response, there were calls to boycott the brand. The brand responded by clarifying this never happened – and that Hilfiger had never been a guest on Oprah’s show at all – via its website, and also by addressing the rumor on various online discussion boards. Winfrey corroborated these claims, stating that the rumor was ‘a big fat lie that never happened’ (Hilfiger et al., 2016, p. 238; Stoute and Rivas, 2012). Yet the rumor persisted for over a decade. In May 2007, Hilfiger finally appeared on the show to put the rumor to bed once and for all.
Today, false information (i.e. information that is not true) in the form of ‘fake news’ features prominently in the brand management landscape. Fake news is defined as a type of false information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent (Lazer et al., 2018; Mills et al., 2019). Fake news can take many forms, including false stories, pictures, reviews or polls (Berthon and Pitt, 2018). Conceptualizations of fake news overlap with those of both misinformation, which is defined as the sharing of false or misleading information, and disinformation, which is defined as creation and sharing of false or misleading information with the intent of engaging in deception (Lazer et al., 2018; Tandoc et al., 2018; Wardle, 2017). Creating and disseminating false information is certainly nothing new;...