ABSTRACT
It may be a Hollywood cliché, but it is nonetheless true – relationships are complicated. Because of this complexity, relationships are generally not unidimensional constructs. What is more, relationships have many moving parts, and it is the way these parts fit together which often defines the relationship type. For example, if when a person arrives you feel happy and when they leave you feel sad, this relationship is typical of friendship. But if when a person arrives you feel sad and when he or she leaves you feel happy, that relationship is more typical of an enemy. Both relationships contain the same parts: someone comes, someone goes, you feel happy, or you feel sad. But these parts fit together differently in each case, and hence the relationships they typify are also quite different. I argue here that relationship types (e.g. friendship, love, enmity) are fairly complex systems whose parts typically include behaviors, emotions, thoughts, social norms, etc. Furthermore, the relationship type is defined not just by what its components are, but by the ways these components interact with each other. I suspect that for many readers, nothing said so far has been terribly controversial. Yet it has been my experience that if one tries to apply this thinking in one’s research, it raises construct validity issues which have not been well explored the past literature. And these unresolved construct validity issues make it difficult to publish research in its most useful and insightful forms. My goal, then, is to begin addressing these issues in the hope that doing so will allow consumer–brand relationship researchers to publish the most theoretically appropriate models for their constructs.
