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This paper examines the literature on the brand love phenomenon and film branding, with a brandscape perspective. It aims to highlight how brand love may affect film branding in nurturing brand advocacy, facilitating premium pricing and promoting brand-related purchases as potential consequences. The paper attempts to take brand love research in a new direction, in order to unfold new dimensions of applicability -assessing the strategic fit of the brand love concept in a service-based setting of film branding. It further distinguishes itself from existing brand love related research by incorporating people and character brands, as opposed to just traditional product placements. Firstly, the paper will draw upon relevant empirical research within brand love, film branding and socio-cultural brandscape literature, thus highlighting key contextual relationships. Secondly, the paper will address core theoretical and managerial implications, concluding with recommendations for future research. Consistent with past research and to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue across all types of marketing domains, this article attempts to strategically tie in the brand love phenomenon to the concept of film branding, as a means of building sustainable consumer-brand relationships that may offer lucrative marketing opportunities and further insights into how consumers experience love for a brand in contemporary society.

Many films are produced annually, but only a small number of films reach the state of being considered and identified by consumers as film brands. Film‐brand identification is difficult to achieve, but it leads to engagement behaviours (e.g. repetitive viewing, positive word‐of‐mouth and purchase intention of relevant merchandise/franchise). To help film‐makers better develop films as brands and benefit from their brand status, this paper takes a consumer‐centric approach to investigate how and why films are identified and engaged by consumers as brands. Using an abductive mode of reasoning, a consumer film‐brand engagement framework was developed through qualitative data collected from 35 semi‐structured interviews and then validated using survey data with 1030 participants. This consumer film‐brand engagement framework shows that film identity coherency drives film‐brand identification through the mediation effects of popularity, sequels and emotional bonding, whilst marketing effort, iconic status, franchising/merchandising activities and timelessness are highlighted as key moderators, resulting in positive brand engagement behaviour. The paper sheds new light on film‐branding literature by theoretically explaining and empirically showing a sequential and consolidated process, which consumers go through to identify and engage with films as brands, leading to several managerial and marketing implications for film‐makers.

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