ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews current research on how consumers' attitudes toward brands are shaped in order to gain a more informed understanding of consumer-brand dynamics for marketing practitioners and academics. It explores characteristics of both brands and consumers, cognitive science concerning how consumers process brand information, and the medium of brand information. Brand personality affects the brand associations that provide the basis for consumers' attitudes toward brands. Advertising is an important driver of how consumers process brand information. When advertising promotes self-association, consumers have more positive implicit attitudes, self-reported attitudes, and greater purchase intentions. Most research on consumers' psychological connections with brands focuses on positive attitudes and drivers of attitude strength. Limited work explores the negative valence dimension, and most of this focuses on mitigating or changing negative attitudes, leaving the understanding of the nature, causes, and outcomes of negative brand attitudes underdeveloped.