Effects of advertising strategy on consumer-brand relationships: A brand love perspective

Abstract

This research investigates the effects of advertising strategy, that is, rational advertising and emotional advertising, on brand love. Based on the consumer-brand relationship literature, brand love is defined as a reciprocal, dynamic, multiplex, and purposive relationship between satisfied consumers and their brands, and has three key components: brand intimacy, brand passion, and brand commitment. Using a series of pretests and a main experiment, we examine how rational and emotional advertising affect brand love as well as its components for different products and services. Results show that for products, there is an interaction between advertising strategy and product type in influencing brand love. Specifically, rational advertising is more effective for utilitarian-value based products while emotional advertising is more effective for hedonic-value based products. For services, we find that emotional advertising is more effective for both utilitarian- and hedonic-value based services.