ABSTRACT
The role of love in brand relationships has drawn increasing interest (Ahuvia 1992, 1993, 2005; Albert, Merunka, and Valette-Florence 2008; Carroll and Ahuvia 2006; Ji 2002; Kamat and Parulekar 2007; Keh, Pang, and Peng 2007; Shimp and Madden 1988; Whang et al. 2004; Yeung and Wyer 2005). While the primary focus of this chapter is on love in consumption, we also present a general theory of love that applies across a broad range of contexts, including interpersonal and person-object situations. By presenting a theory that is broad enough to cover many of the basic dynamics of love in person-object relationships, romantic interpersonal relationships, and family relationships, we do not mean to imply that all these types of love are identical. Past research has shown that even within romantic relationships there are many types of love (Lee 1988), so it would be foolish to deny the differences between a woman’s love for her hobby and her love for her husband. But we focus here on developing a theory of love in consumption contexts that is also consistent with the research on love in interpersonal contexts. We leave a detailed exploration of the differences between these types of love to a separate project.
