Branding research focuses primarily on products and not services, leading to limited insights into service brand avoidance. Understanding service brand avoidance and its possible antecedents will provide marketers with insights into service brand avoidance behaviour of customers in an emerging market and was therefore identified as purpose of this study. Data were collected from 327 South African cell phone customers and subjected to an exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. Identity avoidance and experiential avoidance were found to be the strongest predictors of service brand avoidance. Advertising avoidance, in contrast, did not predict service brand avoidance. This research contributes by quantitatively exploring service brand avoidance and its antecedents, as identified by previous qualitative research.