Exploring significance of consumer brand relationships using their love for mobile phone brands

Many new advances and developments have taken place in the marketing field. One such field that has consistently drawn attention of academicians and practitioners of marketing alike is of branding. A brand plays an influential and significant role in carving out a distinguished place for itself in the market. The consumers can also form bonds with such brands. The consumerbrand bonds and strength ofsuch bonds has been growing largely and immensely over the past three decades. It has been found in the existing literature that consumers develop feelings and emotions for some brands. A number of human emotions like attachment, passion, liking etc. have been studied for the brands and consumers. This paper seeks to understand the new marketing muse of brand love having its roots in the consumer brand behaviour and empirically put it to test using a survey research method andfactor analysis. The key objective is to gain insights of the Indian consumers regarding the consumer and brand relationships using their love for mobile brands used by them. The brand love model of Batra, Ahuvia and Bagozzi (2012) has been used to examine the construct of brand love. Findings indicate that brand love significantly and positively impacts loyalty and word of mouth. The study provides a new ray of light to academicians and practitioners to explore more on this notion, especially in the Indian sub-continent, due a dearth of studies related to the this multi-attribute model and its conceptualization.