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Building meaningful relationships between consumers and service brands has received significant attention. This paper aims to explore how brand love in services – a relationship between the consumer and the service brand – is created through relationships between the consumer and other people. Specifically, we explore how brand love is created through the social relationships consumers form with other consumers.

This conceptual paper synthesizes the literature on consumer-brand relationships, brand community, social support and service providers, psychological ownership and brand love in the context of services.

This paper suggests that consumers love brands that are meaningful to them. Brands can become more meaningful to consumers by facilitating interpersonal connections and helping consumers define their identity. The connection between social relationships with other consumers and brand love is mediated by the consumer's level of perceived membership in the community. For some consumers, perceived membership grows to the point of becoming perceived psychological ownership of the community, where the consumer feels a sense of responsibility for the brand's and the community's well-being.

This paper advances theoretical understanding of how brand love operates in services and how it can be enhanced through services’ management.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between brand love and materialism.

This research uses two survey studies that the love of money. In combination, these two studies include over 1,000 participants.

Materialism does not just make consumers more likely to love brands, it also alters the way they relate to brands. Specifically, brand love is associated with loving brands that one currently owns rather than wishing for brands that one cannot afford and vice-versa for materialism. Brand love is also more strongly related to the centrality and success dimensions of materialism than to its happiness dimension. Materialism is not just associated with loving brands; it is also strongly associated with loving money. Finally, there has been an active debate over whether brand love is applicable to a wide variety of brands or just a select few. This research finds that an extremely wide variety of brands are loved by consumers.

The findings are limited by the cross-sectional nature of the survey approach, the use of a student sample and a MTurk sample and by a set of solely US participants.

This research explores the distinction between a brand love-based marketing strategy and a materialism-based strategy. A brand love-based strategy leverages positive emotional connections that consumers have with past purchases of a brand, whereas a materialism-based strategy seeks to make a brand an aspirational high-end purchase. Based on the research results, the authors make the case for a brand love-based strategy. In addition, this research partly challenges, yet also partly supports, the common view among marketing practitioners that brand love is only applicable to a few brands. On the one hand, this research finds that consumers love an extremely wide variety of brands. On the other hand, only a few brands have been successful in building brand love across a large group of consumers. Thus, brand love appears to be a more widely applicable strategy than sometimes thought yet also a very challenging strategy to get right.

This research supports prior findings which suggest that the negative outcomes of materialism (e.g. unhappiness) are mostly associated with its happiness dimension (i.e. “I would be happier if I had more money”). In contrast, the findings also suggest that brand love is more weakly associated with its happiness dimension than its centrality and success dimensions. Thus, brand love may be a positive (or at least not a negative) expression of materialism.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical examination of the relationship between brand love and materialism and finds that although these two constructs are correlated, they are empirically distinct. This research is also the first to test the relationship between materialism and love for status brands and finds that materialistic individuals display greater love for these types of brands. This research also introduces the construct of “brand love tendency” which is defined as a consumer’s overall tendency to love brands. Finally, this research is also the first to relate the love of money to both materialism and brand love.

This paper argues for the following sensitizing proposition. At its core, much of consumer behavior that involves brand meanings is an attempt to influence, or symbolically mark, interpersonal relationships.

This paper presents a conceptual argument based on a literature review.

First, I argue that our pervasive concern with other people is a basic genetic component of human beings, and discuss some possible evolutionary pressures that may have led to this result. Then I discuss how this pervasive concern influences consumer behavior related to brand meanings. This discussion is structured around two aspects of social relationships: interpersonal closeness and social status. Relationship closeness is discussed with regard to brand communities, gifts, special possessions and brand love, and the often hidden ways that social relationships permeate everyday consumer behavior. Social status is discussed with reference to materialism. Materialism is sometimes misunderstood as an obsession with physical object, or as occurring when people care more about products than they do about people. In contrast, I argue that materialism is better understood as a style of relating to people.

This paper integrates a range of disparate findings in support of a broadly applicable generalization that nothing matters more to people than other people. This generalization can function as a sensitizing proposition that managers and researchers can bear in mind as they seek to interpret and understand how brand meaning influences consumer behavior.

The aim of this paper is to critically review the most significant writings on “two” constructs that have quickly acquired the status of “important marketing topics”; that is, brand attachment (BA) and brand love (BL).

A profound and parallel inspection of highly influential articles along with ensuing essays by the same single authors is performed.

This review reveals that: hardly a year goes by without some reinventions or retouching of these constructs’ conceptual characteristics; there are several striking similarities between them; the politics of marketing theory are at work in keeping these constructs away from each other; the literature under scrutiny not only suffers from amnesia, but also from some severe schizophrenic symptoms; and that BA and BL are nothing more than the same core knowledge product offered under different brand names.

This review is limited to considering the constructs of BA and BL.

Because the literature on BA and BL has been essentially empirical, this paper has the potential to add a compulsory conceptual component to it. It also has the potential of instigating discussions, debates and, in due course, a deeper understanding of these “two” constructs.

The purpose of this study is to question the prospective relevance of conceptual articles on branding.

The paper advocates the development of conceptual articles with prospective relevance by emphasizing two key elements – the form and the context of discovery. The paper is illustrated with empirical data on how some branding researchers have produced such conceptual articles.

To author such articles the researchers might focus more on the initial phase of theorizing, when their intuition makes it possible to imagine new reality through alternative forms. The paper also highlights a need to reconsider the role of essays in branding research, particularly in writing conceptual pieces of prospective relevance.

The connection between intuition and form is crucial to producing prospectively relevant conceptual articles. By evolving along the middle ground, without falling into empirical production on the one hand or guruization on the other, the researcher can give form to emerging branding phenomena.

The paper renews the debate on the need for more conceptual articles by focusing on a forgotten but crucial dimension: foresight relevance.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of product category on consumer brand relationships.

Based on a total of 800 consumers, respondents evaluated their relationship with their favorite brand in one of the four product categories studied (soft drink, mobile phone, shoes, cars). EFA, subsequent CFA, SEM and ANOVA were used to assess these relationships and the product category effect.

The authors find that brand love positively influences brand loyalty and both, influence positively WOM and purchase intention. Looking at the directionality of these relationships, the results show no product category differences. However, the authors found significant differences in terms of their intensity and their effect on the explanation power of the brand outcome variables WOM and purchase intention.

The survey was conducted in Brazil and future research should assess the same product categories in other cultural settings as well as consider other product categories to assess the external validity of these results.

This paper demonstrates that consumer brand relationships are not product category specific. However, certain product categories tend to have more intense relationships than other product categories.

Despite the importance of the product category effect in the branding literature, this study shows that consumer brand relationship theory can be applied to different product categories. This suggests, the product category is less important in the study design than the unit of analysis which requires to be consumer's favorite brands.