The creation and management of customer relationships is fundamental to the practice of marketing. Marketers have long maintained a keen interest in relationships: what they are, why they are formed, what effects they have on consumers and the marketplace, how they can be measured and when and how they evolve and decline.
While marketing research has a long tradition in the study of business relationships between manufacturers and suppliers and buyers and sellers, attention in the past decade has expanded to the relationships that form between consumers and their brands (such as products, stores, celebrities, companies or countries). The aim of this book is to advance knowledge about consumer-brand relationships by disseminating new research that pushes beyond theory, to applications and practical implications of brand relationships that businesses can apply to their own marketing strategies.
With contributions from an impressive array of scholars from around the world, this volume will provide students and researchers with a useful launch pad for further research in this blossoming area.
Foreword Introduction: The Why, How, and So What of Consumers' Relationships with Their Brands Part I: The "What" of Brand Relationships: Exploring Brand Relationship Varieties and Type 1. When is our Connection to Brands like our Connection to People?: Differentiating between Consumer-Brand Relationships and Interpersonal Relationships 2. Exploring Relationship Analogues in the Brand Space 3. Understanding Negative Consumer Responses: Motivations for the Brand Avoidance Relationship 4. Brand Flings: When Great Brand Relationships Are Not Made to Last 5. Examining Childhood Consumption Relationships 6. Mental Accounting in Consumer-Brand Relationships Part II: Understanding Consumer-Brand Relationship Bonds: Brand Love and Other Strength Indicators 7. Love Actually?: Measuring and Exploring Consumers' Brand Love 8. Brand Love: Interpersonal or Parasocial Love Relationships? 9. Brand Relationship Quality - Conceptualization and Measurement: Results of a Cross-Industry Study in the German Consumer Market 10. Brand Forgiveness: How Close Brand Relationships Influence Forgiveness 11. Relationships Are Complicated: On Construct Validity when Consumer-Brand Relationships are Systems Part III: How Goals and Identity Drive Consumers' Relationships with their Brands 12. This Store Just Gets Me!: Customer Chemistry and its Role in Identity Construction 13. Beyond Relationship: Metaphor Transfer and Beyond 14. Teenagers' Purposive Brand Relationships: From Social Filters to Shoulders to Lean On 15. Brands Can Be like Friends: Goals and Interpersonal Motives Influence Attitudes toward Preferred Brands Part IV: Managerial Applications and Extensions of Consumer-Brand Relationship Ideas 16. Firing Your Best Customers 17. On the Complexity of Managing Brands in a Social Media World 18. Corporate Identity and its Reflective Effect in Developing Brand Relationships 19. Brand Humanity: Transforming the Business of Building Brands Final Reflections: So Where Do We Go from Here?
