Brands and Brand Management Under Threat in an Age of Fake News Journal of Product & Brand Management - 29

The volume concludes with three papers that look more deeply into the impact of fake news on bands and their management. Reporting the evidence from a large sample, Paschen (2020) compares fake and real news, and finds that, compared to real news, fake news is significantly more negative, both in terms of displaying negative emotions and a lack of positive emotions. Then Peterson (2020) digs into the brand managerial implications of the rise of fake news and different approaches to respond to it more effectively to minimize brand damage and risk. Finally, Flostrand, Pitt, and Kietzmann (2020) report the results of a three round Delphi study of the perspective of a panel of brand management experts from industry and academia on fake news and brands. Developed at the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s and 1960s as a way of forecasting future scenarios in the absence of hard data, the Delphi technique provides a useful mechanism to predict the future outcomes of broad phenomena, society and business practice.