Customer relationship building: The role of brand attractiveness and consumer-brand identification

Building enduring relationships with consumers is a key marketing objective for most firms, but how can they develop such relationships? Drawing on social identity and self-verification theories, this research postulates that value congruence and customer-to-customer similarity drives consumer-brand identification directly and indirectly through brand attractiveness, which in turn paves the way for the development of deep relationships with brands (captured through brand loyalty and resilience to negative information). The findings show that (1) brand identification extends to both private and public consumption settings, but the respective drivers of identification markedly differ; (2) the similarity-attraction paradigm helps explain why consumers are attracted to some brands and not others; (3) identified consumers tend to ignore negative information they receive about the brand. Findings suggest that managers should identify the salient determinants for enhancing identification and create the highest possible congruence between the values of the target market and the brand.