Brand love: the emotional bridge between experience and engagement, generation-M perspective
| Published date | 11 March 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-04-2018-1852 |
| Pages | 200-215 |
| Date | 11 March 2019 |
| Author | Muhammad Junaid,Fujun Hou,Khalid Hussain,Ali Ashiq Kirmani |
| Subject Matter | Marketing |
Brand love: the emotional bridge between
experience and engagement,
generation-M perspective
Muhammad Junaid
School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, and Department of Management Sciences,
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Sahiwal, Punjab, Pakistan
Fujun Hou
School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
Khalid Hussain
School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China and Department of Management Sciences,
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Sahiwal, Punjab, Pakistan, and
Ali Ashiq Kirmani
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Sahiwal, Punjab, Pakistan
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact on brand love of consumption experience at the dimensional level and to determine
whether brand love mediates between consumption experience and customer engagement in the contex t of Generation M.
Design/methodology/approach –A sample of 265 Muslim smartphone users responded to a structured questionnaire adapted from existing
literature. First, confirmatory factor analysis was carried out, and then data were analyzed through structural equation modeling using MPlu s.
Findings –The findings indicate that hedonic pleasure and escapism directly, while flow, challenge and learning indirectly affect brand love and
that brand love mediates the relationship between consumption experience and customer engagement.
Practical implications –This paper explicates Generation M’s consumption experience, ascertains ways to supplement their love for brand and
engage them in gainful relationships and provides suggestions for further investigation. From a managerial perspective, the paper has implications
for the management of consumer experience, identifies the most valuable dimensions of consumption experience and proposes that managers can
develop customer-engagement strategies via brand love.
Originality/value –The paper validates the mediating role of brand love in the relationship between consumption exper ience and customer
engagement; is the first to investigate the relationship between all dimensions of consumption experience and brand love; is one of few studies to
investigate consumption experience, brand love and customer engagement in developing countries; and is one of first investigations to use a sample
of Generation M.
Keywords Relationship marketing, Socialization, Customer engagement, Brand love, Customer relationship management,
Consumption experience, Generation M, Interpersonal love
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Globalization,a compelling truth in today’s businessrealm, has
forged an intense atmosphere of competition between national
and multinational brands.Brands provide an unending array of
offerings to grow and sustain their customer base, as attracting
a new customer costs six times what it costs to sustain one
(Rafiet al.,2011).The importance of sustaining customers has
been well-established bymarketing experts, but recent shifts in
consumer preferences has revitalized the issue. With the
enhanced functional quality of many mass-market products
now customers look beyond these products’functional,
instrumental value to extract social, creative (Schmitt, 1999),
absorbing (Holbrook, 2000), enjoyable and shareable
experiences from products. Consumer research has revealed
that customers may developstrong emotional bonds with some
objects (Dwayne Ball and Tasaki, 1992), gifts (Mick and
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1061-0421.htm
Journal of Product & Brand Management
28/2 (2019) 200–215
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421]
[DOI 10.1108/JPBM-04-2018-1852]
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Number 71571019). The authors are sincerely thankful to editorial
team and anonymous referees for giving us helpful suggestions that have
enhanced the value of this paper.
Received 12 April 2018
Revised 12 April 2018
8 July 2018
11 September 2018
20 September 2018
Accepted 20 September 2018
200
Demoss, 1990) and brands(Rafiet al., 2011;Thomson, 2006).
Marketers can capitalize on these emotional aspects of
consumptionto address these opportunistic challenges.
Marketing practitioners opine that brand love is the prime
objective of brand management (Hegner et al.,2017). When
Monster outsold Red Bull for the first time, Jamal Benmiloud,
leader of Monster’s marketing team at the time, stated that this
success was the outcome of their targeted efforts toward winning
“love”for the brand, rather than going for general awareness.
They built a team of millions by following the philosophy, “Why
aim to be liked as a business, when you can be loved?”(Brown
et al.,2015), which was magic for them. Given the practical
importance of brand love, contemporary researchers also endorse
it as the central point of consumer–brand relationships (Bagozzi
et al., 2017;Kaufmann et al.,2016).
The concept of brand love is not independent of experience
(Garg et al.,2015), as it is a consumer’s emotive and passionate
connection with a brand (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006) that can be
strengthened through experience-based factors (Venkatesan
et al., 2018). Triantafillidou and Siomkos (2014),divided
consumption experience into seven sub-dimensions: hedonism,
flow, communitas, learning, escapism, challenge and
socialization. Recently, academics have elucidated the influence
of consumption experience on variables like behavioral intention
and satisfaction, but most have scrutinized consumption
experience as a higher-order variable (Biçakcıo
glu et al.,2016;de
Oliveira Santini et al.,2018;Huang, 2017). Without studying
these dimensions individually, researchers fail to clarify the
phenomenon in any depth, settling for a generalized, overall
assessment.
Customers with such positive experiences that they are in
“love”withabrandarelikelytocultivatestrongoutcomeslike
customer engagement. Customer engagementisaconstructwith
escalating prominence because of its ability to affect consumer
behavior positively (Venkatesan et al., 2018)andtoaugment
brand performance (Harmeling et al.,2018). The Marketing
Science Institute (MSI) named customer engagement its key
research priority between 2010-2012 and 2014-2016. Even so,
empirical research on this emerging construct remains nebulous
(Hollebeek et al.,2014).
This paper offers a more comprehensive investigation of
consumption experience at the levels of the dimensions of hedonic
pleasure, flow, communitas, learning, escapism, challenge and
socialization. Although consumption experience, brand love and
customer engagement are prominent issues in marketing research,
few studies have investigated the interrelationships between them.
In addition, consumption experience, brand love and customer
engagement have been points of discussion in developed countries,
but research in developing countries is scarce (Kudeshia et al.,
2016;Sarkar and Sarkar, 2016), especially with reference to
Generation M.
“Generation M”refers to the new generation of Muslim
millennials (Janmohamed, 2016) . Muslim millennials are
estimated to consume $3 trillion in food and lifestyle products
worldwide by 2021 (Reuters and Standard, 2016). These
consumers wear haute couture, engage in an “eco-jihad”and
drink halal beer while also going to the mosque for prayers,
being symbols of peace and following the basic doctrines of
Islam. These consumers are committed to being active partsof
the world’s marketplace and have no desire to be seen by those
in non-Muslim states as political problems. Pakistan is not
merely a developing state but also an appreciable sample of
Generation M constitutedof more than 207 million consumers
and is increasingly urbanized (PBS, 2017). Its young and
diverse population offers great business opportunities for
brands, as these consumers have a tendencyto be loving and to
be actively engaged in modern ways. Cellular tele-density has
increased to 70.85 percent, with 139.78 million mobile
subscribers as of June 2017 (PTA, 2017). This study
determines the degree to which they are stimulated by brand
love and how to engage Generation M in an advantageous
relationship.
The study’sfindings can be generalized beyond Generation
M because they indicate the interrelationship, and consequent
direct and indirect effects on brand love of the dimensions of
consumption experience practitioners can work on to gain
competitive advantage. The findings also serve smartphone
managers by suggesting ways to develop customer acquisition
and engagementstrategies via brand love.
Literature review
Brand love
Love is “something about passion, excitement, and a hunger to
lose the self or achieve union”(Aron and Aron, 1996). In the area
of emotive connection with brands, Shimp and Madden (1988)
were first to establish the variable of brand love as a link between
love of consumption and interpersonal love. Brands with this
potency were first referred to as “love-marks”(Roberts, 2005)
and later labeled brand love (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006).
Grounded primarily in the theories of para-social love
(Fetscherin, 2014) and interpersonal love (Batra et al.,2012;
Langner et al.,2015), brand love has drawn considerable
attention in diverse contexts (Bagozzi et al.,2017;Drennan et al.,
2015;Eilaghi Karvandi, 2016;Hegner et al.,2017;Huang, 2017;
Iyer et al., 2016;Kaufmann et al.,2016;Rauschnabel and
Ahuvia, 2014;Rodrigues, 2017;Roy et al., 2016;Wallace et al.,
2014). The construct of brand love has been regarded as
comparable to humans’interpersonal love (Ahuvia, 1993;
Lastovicka and Sirianni, 2011). Batra et al. (2012) critiqued the
extant research for assuming this similarity without testing it or
even considering possible areas of difference. They used a
grounded theory approach to explore and explain the
phenomenon and found a high level of similarity between brand
love attributes and those of interpersonal love.
Brand love refers to a strongsentimental inclination towarda
brand (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006), the sum of cognitive
behaviorsthat are driven by fondness fora brand (Bergkvist and
Bech-Larsen, 2010), and a set of “cognitions, emotions, and
behaviors, which consumers organize in a mental prototype”
(Batra et al.,2012). Brand love has multiple dimensions
(Thomson et al.,2005;Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006;Albert et al.,
2008;Batra et al.,2008,2012;Heinrichet al.,2008;Albert and
Valette-Florence , 2010) because extant literature has led to
divergent views on brand love, but researchers have tended to
value Carroll and Ahuvia’s (2006) operationalization above
those of others (Huang, 2017;Huber et al.,2015;
Vernuccio et al.,2015). Brand love is distinguished from other
relational constructs that have significant impact on the
consumer–brand relationship (Loureiro et al.,2017), but
Brand love
Muhammad Junaid et al.
Journal of Product & Brand Management
Volume 28 · Number 2 · 2019 · 200–215
201
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