Gaming and luxury brands: love and hate

Consumers tend to display strong emotional involvement in the decision-making process of purchasing luxury items. This behavior increases the chances of developing extreme adverse effects when negative feelings are aroused. The present exploratory research analyzes how perceived unethical fashion luxury gamification activities in videogames reflects on negative electronic word-of-mouth and brand hate. The exploratory analysis of 3,667 publicly available comments of players revealed eight main issues related to the practice of gamified luxury product placement in videogames: monetization of the game, promotion of bad behaviors, unethical placement, game commodified by brands, predatory product placements, incongruent brands, poor product performance, and generic evaluations. Ethical concerns of players are highlighted, in order to inspire both luxury and videogame companies’ decisions to rethink their marketing activities and commercial partnerships. Results indeed demonstrated how gamified activities have contributed to feed players’ negative opinions, already exacerbated by pre-existing problematic game dynamics.