“Wow! It’s Cool”: How Brand Coolness Affects the Customer Psychological Well-Being Through Brand Love and Brand Engagement

Abstract

In this era of razor-edge competition, marketers strive to outperform their rivals by improving their brands. Increasing brand coolness may be the best way to do it. This study used a stimulus organism response (SOR) model by integration with brand attribution theory to conduct a cross sectional study using purposive sampling technique and surveying young consumers of smart gadgets in Pakistan. A total of 1,178 responses were received and analyzed by structural equation modeling. The results found a positive impact of brand coolness (stimulus) on brand love and brand engagement (both modeled as organism). Brand experience moderated these links. Brand love and brand engagement also mediated the relationship between brand coolness and consumer well-being and delight (both modeled as response). The findings suggest a very important contribution to theory and practice by testing unexploited outcomes of brand coolness. Especially, this study contributes to the consumer well-being literature, again an unexploited aspect of marketing literature. Despite the uniqueness of the findings, the cross sectional design of this study remains a major limitation. Future research may supplement the findings with the help of longitudinal studies. Marketers and practitioners may benefit from this study by improving the coolness of their brands so they may not only increase consumer engagement with the brand but they will also make consumers happy with their brands.

Cool brands and hot attachments: their effect on consumers’ willingness to pay more

“…As such, a brand relationship can evoke hot, affect-based emotions and emotional attachment (Fournier, 1998;Thomson et al, 2005;Park et al, 2010). Extant research finds that brands perceived as cool are related to intense emotions, like love and desire (Attiq et al, 2022;Khoi and Le, 2022;Loureiro et al, 2020;. This research adopts Thomson et al's (2005) conceptualization of emotional brand attachment as it is consistent with previous literature and captures a broad array of emotions that reflect attachment in brand relationships (Fournier, 1998).…”

“…Khoi and Le (2022) show that luxury hotel brand coolness positively relates to customer brand engagement through brand satisfaction and brand love. Attiq et al (2022) also find a positive relationship between brand coolness and brand engagement, and add a new outcome of cool brands: customer psychological well-being. Finally, Jim enez- Barreto et al (2022) distinguish between product and service brand coolness and find service brand coolness enhances communal brand connection and loyalty.…”

“…The most recent research on cool brands adds to the nomological network by looking at novel antecedents and consequences in different contexts and cultures including Pakistan (Attiq et al , 2022), Vietnam (Khoi and Le, 2022), Japan (Suzuki and Kanno, 2022) and the USA (Bagozzi and Khoshnevis, 2022; Jiménez-Barreto et al , 2022). Bagozzi and Khoshnevis (2022) add product quality as an antecedent to brand coolness and provide support for the autonomous function of brand coolness through examining the material self as a boundary condition that regulates the effect of brand coolness on word of mouth and purchase intentions.…”

Role of social media marketing activities in China’s e-commerce industry: A stimulus organism response theory context

“…Prior research argued that SMMAs may serve as an external environmental stimuli (Koay et al, 2020). Similarly, following a series of involved cognitive processes, the organism would respond to environmental stimuli with either an external or internal behavioral response (Liu and Zheng, 2019;Attiq et al, 2022). The external response takes the form of the individual's unique behavior, while the internal response takes the form of the individual's attitude (Lorenzo-Romero et al, 2016).…”

Generation Z’s Brand Love for Skincare Products: Do Religious Beliefs Matter?

“…Research conducted in the 1970s still focused on product and customer satisfaction measurements (Cohen & Houston, 1972;Sheth, 1970). It was only in the 1980s that research on branding began to emerge (Murphy, 1988;Wernerfelt, 1988), and since then, researchers around the world have explored the consumer-brand relationship, which involves an emotional connection (Attiq et al, 2022;Garg & Joshi, 2018;Kang, 2015). Consumer emotions are a critical factor in determining the success of a brand (Mingione et al, 2020), as emotional attachment to a brand can foster loyalty even in the face of intense market competition (Kang, 2015).…”