دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله وفاداری برند: بررسی ارتباط خودبرندسازی و تجربه برند (نشریه امرالد ۲۰۱۸)

وفاداری برند: بررسی ارتباط خودبرندسازی و تجربه برند

Brand loyalty: Exploring self-brand connection and brand experience

Abstract

Purpose – This paper determines one explanation for how the self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty through the brand experience. Brand experience should verify the self-brand connection by acting as a mechanism through which a self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty.

Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from 317 adults through paid Facebook Boosting of an online survey, and analyzed using structural equation modelling.

Findings – Analyses confirm that brand experience fully mediates the association between selfbrand connection and brand loyalty.

Research limitations / implications – Ensuring a positive brand experience is critical for brand managers opting to maintain consumers’ self-brand connections and brand loyalty. Causality suffered owing to the cross-sectional design of the study.

Practical implications – Self-brand connection is viewed as consumer-driven. However, by identifying the brand experience to verify the self-brand connection and as a factor that mediates the self-brand connection-loyalty relationship of consumers, brand experience is recognized as a new factor which brand managers can control to manage self-brand connections and brand loyalty.

Originality / value – This paper is the first to apply self-verification theory to the self-brand connection-loyalty relationship by explicating brand experience as a mediator of this relationship. This paper argues self-verification is not context specific and lived experiences with the brand, irrespective of context, establish consumer-brand relationships. This paper confirms the secondorder factor structure of the brand experience scale (Brakus et al., 2009) as a mediator in this selfbrand connection-loyalty model.

۱ Introduction

Mahatma Gandhi acknowledged the relevance of self-verification theory in saying, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony”. As consumers we strive for such consistency in our views of ourselves, that is, our self-concept. Brands which have been incorporated into our self-concept require that our resulting behavior and experiences must align with the self-concept to minimize psychological discomfort. Such self-verification provides a sense of prediction and control over the social environment, and is therefore important for establishing an accurate and reliable self-concept (Swann and Read, 1981).

Consumers have an innate drive to define and express themselves through the purchases they make. Based on McCracken’s (1989) theory of meaning, meaning is transferred from the culturally constituted world to brands and then onto consumers. Seminal work has indicated that consumers direct their behavior to maintain or enhance their self-concept (Grubb and Grathwohl, 1967), where self-concept refers to the way consumers think and feel about who, and what, they perceive themselves to be (Rosenberg, 1981). Consumers’ self-concept can be linked to a brand, resulting in self-brand connections (Escalas and Bettman, 2003). These self-brand connections are very subjective, consumer-driven personal relationships.

Self-brand connection is defined as the degree to which consumers incorporate the brand into their self-concepts (Escalas and Bettman, 2003), which results in varied intensity levels of consumerbrand relationships (Fournier, 1998). For example, a consumer with a strong self-brand connection to Apple may view himself as thinking differently, linking his behavior and self-concept to Apple’s slogan, and may feel like an innovator, linking his status to Apple’s as an innovation leader. He therefore adopts Apple as a way to create, portray and express these characteristics of the selfconcept through consumption of the brand. So, consumers may describe the brand experience associated with brands through relationships (Schmitt et al., 2015), thus demonstrating the association between self-brand connection and brand experience, although previously unexplored. Brakus et al. (2009:53) define brand experience “as subjective, internal consumer responses (sensations, feelings and cognitions) and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments.” In this paper, the cumulative brand experience of brand-related stimuli, fully reflecting the total accumulation of ways consumers interact with and are affected by the brand, as recalled for a favorite brand, was considered. As illustration, a consumer’s overall brand experience with Apple, and not one single discrete interaction with brand-related stimuli, such as using the iPhone 7 for the first time, is relevant for this paper. Both self-brand connection (Escalas and Bettman, 2003) and brand experience (Brakus et al., 2009) is positively associated with brand loyalty, which, in turn, also provides value to brands through continued and increased purchase intentions and behavior, price insensitivity and recommendations (Oliver, 1999).

It is argued that brand experience, being a personal response when interacting with the brand (Morgan-Thomas and Veloutsou, 2013), could be considered a self-verification process, as interaction provides opportunity for self-verification (Swann and Read, 1981). In keeping with selfverification theory, consumers act to validate and maintain salient self-concepts, such as the selfbrand connection, to avoid cognitive dissonance about who they are (Swann and Read, 1981). Such self-verification would not only occur through the senses, or feelings, or behavior, or thoughts, but includes the total experience accumulated through all of the dimensions of the brand experience when interacting with the brand stimuli.