Consumer engagement with self-expressive brands: brand love and WOM outcomes

Abstract

She holds a PhD in Business Administration. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Aston Business School and Birmingham Business School, England. Isabel is a member of the research group Generes recognised by the Government of Aragon. She has published research papers in both local and international journals. She has attended and presented research papers to national and international conferences.

Brand love and positive word of mouth: the moderating effects of experience and price

“…Albert and Merunka, 2013;Huber et al, 2015) also suggests that brands that encourage consumers to express themselves are the most likely to be loved. Carroll and Ahuvia (2006), as well as Wallace et al (2014), confirm this and find a strong association between the self-expressiveness of the brand and brand love.…”

“…In addition, Kudeshia et al (2016) show that a strong positive relationship exists between brand love and WOM. Therefore, brand love is considered to directly predict positive WOM (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006;Batra et al, 2012;Fetscherin, 2014) and also to act as a mediator between self-expressiveness and WOM (Wallace et al, 2014) and hedonic value and WOM (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006). Thus, we posit that: …”

“…For example, Batra et al (2012) show that consumers describe their beloved objects in terms of possessing similar features and characteristics to themselves. Matzler et al (2011) and Wallace et al (2014) highlight how products and brands that consumers are emotionally attached to are not only in harmony with the consumers' selfperceptions, but also prompt consumers to communicate those perceptions to others. Therefore, to develop brand love, a consumer must have a feeling of psychological proximity with the particular brand (cf.…”

“…A beloved brand is an integrated part of the consumer's self-expressiveness, and by using a certain brand and demonstrating love towards it, the consumer expresses his or her self to others (Albert et al, 2008;Huber et al, 2015;Wallace et al, 2014). In addition to selfexpressiveness, brand trust (Albert and Merunka, 2013;Drennan et al, 2015) and a brand's hedonic value (Batra et al, 2012;Huber et al, 2015) have also been shown to be antecedents of brand love.…”

“…Several desirable outcomes of brand love have been proposed, such as brand loyalty, positive word of mouth (WOM) (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006;Albert and Merunka, 2013;Wallace et al, 2014), stronger purchase intentions (Fetscherin, 2014;Kudeshia et al, 2016;Pawle and Cooper, 2006), and greater willingness to pay price premiums (Albert and Merunka, 2013;Fedorikhin et al, 2008;Thomson et al, 2005) and accept product failures (Grisaffe and Nguyen, 2011). Owing to the growing influence of peer reviews and suggestions on consumers' buying decisions, positive WOM in both offline and online environments (i.e., electronic WOM [eWOM]) are the key objectives of today's marketing activities (Chen and Xie, 2008).…”