Abstract: Negative consumer brand engagement has aroused scholars’ attention, but most of the researches were carried out from the aspect of negatively-valenced consumer brand engagement, and its logical framework is still unclear. More importantly, there is a lack of measurement scale, which makes it improbable to provide early warning for the brand crisis. To address these limitations, the coding technique of grounded theory is adopted to encode the negative comments in online brand community. On this basis, this paper abides by scientific procedures, defines the essential construct of negative consumer brand engagement, and develops negative consumer brand engagement scale (NCBE) in online brand community. The empirical results show that the scale, featured by superior reliability and validity, provides a measurement scale for the follow-up empirical researches and also provides managers with a new diagnostic tool in the management practice.

Key words: online brand community, negative consumer brand engagement, scale development, coding technique