Ivanova, Anna (2021) Reconciling the relationship between brand love and customer perceived value. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
Love is all around us … Marketing practitioners want consumers to develop exclusive loving relationships with brands and win ‘loyalty beyond the reason’ (Roberts, 2006). The brand love construct is widely agreed by researchers to refer to a strong bond between consumers and brands (e.g., Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006). Despite a multitude of research dedicated to investigating the nomological net of brand love, customer perceived value – a fundamental marketing construct – has been largely neglected. The over-arching aim of the thesis is to reconcile the relationship between brand love and customer perceived value. Three studies address the aim using a mixed methods approach (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 1998): one qualitative (Study 1) and two quantitative (Studies 2 and 3). Set in the context of the UK population, customers’ relationships with brands are explored in general in Study 1 (qualitative) and subsequently tested quantitatively in both high and low involvement consumption contexts in Studies 2 and 3, i.e., within the market categories of automobiles, fashion and food, in order to examine the stability of the findings across different markets. The purpose of Study 1 is to gain insights into the conceptual location of brand love and customer perceived value in consumers’ minds. The results offer evidence that brand love and customer perceived value coalesce in the minds of consumers. In addition, they indicate that brand love is similar to interpersonal love. These findings inform Study 2, whose purpose is to examine whether brand love has a blinding effect on consumers’ perceptions of value. If, indeed, brand love behaves similarly to interpersonal love, grounded on the latter’s propensity to create ‘positive illusions’, the expectation is that high brand love will positively distort consumers’ perceptions of value. Study 2 provides evidence of such effects and thus questions the dominant conceptualisation in extant research of customer perceived value as an antecedent of brand love, especially for well-established brands. Following on from the findings in Study 2, Study 3 investigates the relationship between brand love and customer perceived value at a dimensional level, thus departing from the aggregate approach found in extant literature. The dimensional approach enables a more granular analysis of the relationships among dimensions of brand love and the dimensions of customer perceived value, resulting in the discovery of a complex pattern of functional relationships between the two focal constructs, including evidence of brand love as an influencer of the formation of perceptions of value. The findings of the three studies provide novel insights and contribute to the theoretical development of the relationship between brand love and customer perceived value. In particular, brand love is confirmed to be a multi-dimensional construct that behaves similarly to interpersonal love, having the power to create positive illusions about the loved brand which distort consumers’ perceptions of value. In contradiction to extant research, wherein value is an antecedent to brand love, the present study provides evidence of reverse effects – i.e., that it is consumers’ sense of brand love that leads to the formation of their perceptions of value, and not the other way around. These findings lead to important managerial guidelines that will enable managers to develop marketing campaigns to help fan the flames of consumer brand love.
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