The Pathways of Brand Love : Pathways to brand love out of a consumer perspective

Abstract: AbstractBrand love has become an increasingly interesting area of research for academics and marketing practitioners alike, as it has shown to drive consumer behaviours such as brand loyalty, positive word-of-mouth and negative information resistance (Batra et al., 2012). However, the focus has primarily been on brand love as a concept and how it drives consumer behaviour from a company perspective, and to a lesser extent on the antecedent pathways that lead to it from a consumer perspective. Based on extant research concerning brand love and its antecedents, this study tries to shed more light on the pathways that lead to brand love out of a consumer perspective. This study builds on extant research in brand love by connecting a brand love prototype model (ibid.), with anthropomorphism as an additional antecedent (Rauschnabel & Ahuvia, 2014), and attempts to extend earlier findings regarding the antecedents of brand love by describing how the antecedents form a pathway to brand love as seen out of a consumer’s point of view. The research was carried out by the use of a deductive, qualitative approach and thematical analysis. The data collection was done through the use of unstructured interviews. This study finds that the pathways to brand love can vary and be triggered from different angles, but that the key factors to brand love are anthropomorphism of the brand and integration of the brand into the self. This research is limited by the fact that the pathways are described through the use of a thematical analysis and that the respondents were selected as a result of a convenience selection. It would therefore be prudent to test the findings with a quantitative method and also to extend the number of respondents. This study is the first to qualitatively investigate the pathways between the antecedents of brand love out of a consumer perspective and will contribute to brand love literature by providing new insight into the antecedent pathways of brand love.