ABSTRACT
Nowadays marketers are highly interested in creating and maintaining relationships with their customers. While marketing research has a long tradition of exploring relationships in the business-to-business context (e.g., ties between manufacturer and supplier), attention has expanded to relationships between consumers and their brands (Fournier 1998) in recent decades. While management-oriented literature (e.g., the idea of lovemarks) has already revealed emotions as a core concept for establishing and upholding strong bonds between a consumer and a brand (Roberts 2005, 2006), academic research on this topic is still in its infancy. There are hardly any studies that have focused on consumer–brand love relationships (Ahuvia 1993; Albert, Merunka, and Valette-Florence 2008; Bauer, Heinrich, and Albrecht 2009; Carroll and Ahuvia 2006) in detail so far. Thus, the current study intends to contribute to filling this research gap by exploring the concept of brand love.
