What is love? Exploring the meaning of brand love and its role in determining brand loyalty

Abstract

This paper measures brand love of smartphones in a specific cultural context. It assesses and compares the effects of brand love and satisfaction on brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. The authors use a qualitative approach to select and adapt a measurement scale of the brand love construct for Germany. They use a quantitative study to evaluate the relationships between brand love, satisfaction, brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth for the case of smartphone brands. Brand love measurement needs to be adapted to the German context. Brand love has a higher impact than satisfaction on brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth for smartphones. Brand love partly mediates the relationship between satisfaction and brand loyalty as well as positive word-of-mouth. The brand love construct has been tested in a specific cultural context, in this case, Germany. Scale development efforts have to be dedicated to the verification and/or adaptation of the construct to other cultural environments like Latin America. Practitioners should include the measurement of brand love in addition to satisfaction in order to predict brand loyalty. The adaptation of the brand love construct to a specific cultural context has been ignored in previous literature. The comparison of the direct effects of brand love and satisfaction as well as the indirect effects of brand love have been neglected so far.