Expletives and derogatory terminology are increasingly being used in the naming structure for companies, products and brands as a marketing strategy. As a growing practice across numerous industries, it is intended to garner attention of the target audience, break through the proverbial clutter and create distinction within the competitive landscape. We identify this strategy as brand vulgarity, which refers to the use of sexual, derogatory, insults and scatology referents in branding. This comprises referents socially determined as profanity, obscenity, or indecent terminology as elements (i.e., name, taglines, logos/symbols, URL’s, etc.) used to identify a company, its products and brands (Griffiths 2018).

Much research exists on the impact and importance of names (corporate, product, brand), yet minimal attention has been given to brand vulgarity as a marketing strategy, that affects a company’s reputation, image and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Corporate reputation is the “observer’s collective judgments of a corporation based on assessment of the financial, social and environmental impacts attributed to the corporation over time” (Barnett et al. 2006, p. 34). Gray and Balmer (1998, 696) defines corporate image as “the mental picture of the company held by its audiences—what comes to mind when one sees or hears the corporate name or sees its logo”. CSR is a growing means for enhancing goodwill and building brand equity, and many companies have created and implanted formalized CSR programs and initiatives aimed at creating favorable associations from customers, employees and other stakeholders, and helping to build a sustainable advantage (Bernstein 1984; Brown and Dacin 1997; Davies and Miles 1998; Worcester 1972).

A key component of CSR is corporate reputation. Research has shown corporate reputation mediates the relationship between corporate social responsibility and several outcomes including brand performance (Lai et al. 2010), customer satisfaction and market value (He and Li 2011), brand satisfaction and customer loyalty. Given that a company’s reputation and image are intimately tied to the outcome of its CSR activities, what would be the effect of brand vulgarity on reputation and image? Subsequently, what might be the impact on CSR activities when brand vulgarity is present? We explore these research questions here as we conceptualize the effects brand vulgarity has on the CSR → reputation → image relationship.