All you need is Love: Assessing Consumers' Brand Love

Abstract

Marketers have already picked up the idea of beloved brands and are using emotionally laden advertising messages to create consumers’ love for brands. This can, amongst others, be recognized by slogans like “Mini – Is it Love?” or “McDonalds – I’m lovin’ it.” In managementoriented literature, there are some hints that the emotion of love plays a major role for creating a strong bond between a consumer and a brand. Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts (2005), for instance, has developed the idea of “lovemarks.” In academic research, the concept of consumers’ brand love has lately been introduced into marketing literature (e.g., Ahuvia 1993; Ji 2002; Whang et al. 2004; Carroll and Ahuvia 2006). Nevertheless, a solid understanding and valid measurement scale is still missing. The study intends to contribute to fill this research gap by investigating the concept of brand love.