Online 'Retail Rage' Alive and Well and That May Lead to Jobs in Brand Management. Really.

Do you ever get mad when you go to the grocery store and the item you have a coupon for is not listed at the sale price -- or there at all?

Well, this may lead to more jobs  in brand management.

Say what? (Do people even say that anymore??!!)

Studies say buyers are angrier than ever, and that "retail rage" is real, according to newswise.com. 
While a person behind a shopping cart may not inflict the same kind of damage as someone driving a 6,000-pound SUV (aka road rage), a few years ago researchers began noticing a troubling rise in violence at malls and big-box stores.
"The increase was especially dramatic around the holiday shopping season," says Joshua D. Dorsey, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at California State University, Fullerton. "During what was supposed to be a happy time, people were actually getting hurt."
In research on "aisle rage" published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Dorsey wrote about the Florida man who became involved in a dispute with a fellow Walmart shopper about who was on the right side of an aisle. The man whacked the shopper in the head with a dustpan with such fury the handle broke off, the website reports
Then there was the Los Angeles woman who, during a Black Friday sale, engaged in escalated "competitive shopping," pepper-spraying another customer so she'd have first dibs on some heavily discounted merchandise, newswise.com notes.
Fists may not fly on the Web, but lately Dorsey has seen retail rage shift to online shopping, where it's becoming even more common. In the digital realm, fury takes the form of scorching comments on Yelp and Twitter and Facebook, among other social platforms. And the bruising is to brands, not individuals.
"Negative word of mouth can spread virally online," explains Dorsey. "For marketers it's the equivalent of a public health epidemic. If there's not a quick and effective response, the impact can be huge and difficult to recover from."
Still, there's a silver lining to shopper wrath. As Dorsey tells the students in his marketing classes at CSU Fullerton, this type of consumer behavior is opening up new job opportunities. "There are now branding agencies and entire departments within companies devoted to monitoring social media and responding to negative comments," he says. "Brand management within the digital space has really grown as a career path." 











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