Consumer-Brand Relationships Theory and Practice

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 (Kevin Lane Keller) Introduction: The Why, How, and So What of Consumers’ Relationships with Their Brands (Marc Fetscherin, Michael Breazeale, Susan Fournier) 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 (Vanitha Swaminathan and Sara Loughran Dommer) 2. Exploring Relationship Analogues in the Brand Space (Felicia Miller, Susan Fournier and Chris Allen) 3. Motivations for the Brand Avoidance Relationship(Allyn White, Michael Breazeale and Cynthia Webster) 4. Brand Flings: When Great Brand Relationships Are Not Made to Last (Claudio Alvarez and Susan Fournier) 5. Examining Childhood Consumption Relationships (Paul M. Connell and Hope Jensen Schau) 6. Mental Accounting in Consumer-Brand Relationships (Pankaj Aggarwal and Maggie Wenjing Liu) Part II: Understanding Consumer-Brand Relationship Bonds: Brand Love and Other Strength Indicators 7. Love Actually?: Measuring and Exploring Consumers’ Brand Love (Daniel Heinrich, Carmen-Maria Albrecht and Hans H. Bauer) 8. Brand Love:investigating two alternative love relationships(Marc Fetscherin and Mary Conway Dato-On) 9. Conceptualizing and Measuring Brand Relationship Quality(Manfred Bruhn, Falko Eichen, Karsten Hadwich and Sven Tuzovic) 10. Brand Forgiveness: How Close Brand Relationships Influence Forgiveness(Leigh Anne Novak Donovan, Deborah J. MacInnis, Joseph R. Priester and C. Whan Park) 11. Relationships Are Complicated: On Construct Validity when Consumer-Brand Relationships are Systems (Aaron Ahuvia) 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 (Michael Breazeale and Nicole Ponder) 13. The Transfer and Limitations of the Relationship Metaphor in Identity-Relevant Consumption Situations (Hazel Huang) 14. Teenagers’ Purposive Brand Relationships: From Social Filters to Shoulders to Lean On (Samil A. Aledin) 15. Brands Can Be like Friends: Goals and Interpersonal Motives Influence Attitudes toward Preferred Brands (Christopher Long, Philip Gable, Courtney Boerstler and Christina Albee) Part IV: Managerial Applications of Consumer-Brand Relationship Ideas 16. Firing Your Best Customers: How smart firms destroy relationships using CRM(Jill Avery and Susan Fournier) 17. On the Complexity of Managing Brand in a Social Media World (Thomas Leigh and Scott Thompson) 18. Corporate Identity and its Reflective Effect in Developing Brand Relationships (Jean Suvjatis and Leslie de Chernatony) 19. Brand Humanity: Transforming the Business of Building Brands (Stephen Springfield and Padmini Sharma) Final Musings and Mediations: Where Do We Go from Here? (Michael Breazeale and Susan Fournier)

Susan Fournier is Associate Professor and Dean's Research Fellow at Boston University, USA. Her research explores the creation and capture of value through branding and brand relationships and she has received five awards for her published work. She is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing amongst others Michael Breazeale is Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA. His primary areas of research include the consumption of experiences and emotional branding. Mike has published articles in publications such as International Journal of Market Research, Marketing Management Journal and Journal of Business Research Marc Fetscherin is an Associate Professor of the Crummer Graduate School of Business and the International Business Department at Rollins College, USA. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as International Business Review, International Marketing Review, European Journal of Marketing andJournal of Brand Management