Brand Manahement and Loyalty

Brand love
Introduction
Brand love is defined ‘as the degree of passionate emotional attachment a satisfied customer has for a particular brand’ (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006, p. 81) where brand love can lead to positive loyalty outcomes. Loyalty from consumers is said to provide an organization or seller with protection from competition (Mascarenhas, Kesavan, and Bernacchi, 2006), positive word-of mouth, repeat purchasing and sizable purchasing from its consumers (Sirdeshmukh, Singh, and Sabol, 2002). Further to this it has been argued that loyalty provides an economic benefit to an organization beyond repeat purchase where the cost of acquiring new consumers is considerably higher than that of retaining present consumers (Kaynak, Salman, and Tatoglu, 2008; Rundle-Thiele, 2005; Srinivasan, Anderson, and Ponnavolu, 2002). Thus, of what influence is brand love on the loyalty of a brands consumer? Moreover, is there value investigating brand love and loyalty in sport? To answer this it is critical to review what brand love.
Consumers’ love of particular possessions or activities has been widely noted, but suggestions that consumers have “love-like” feelings for brands come mainly from the research on delight, love, and consumer-brand relationships. While these feelings may not be perfectly analogous to the feelings one has for other people, the conclusion from these streams of work is that they can be considerably more intense than simple liking.

Brand Love
Until recently the concept of love was limited to the psychology literature .Building on early psychology theories such as that of Freud (from 1922), Reik (from 1944),and Maslow (from 1962), Sternberg (1997) discussed the idea of love in terms of being love, deficiency love, and love as a search for salvation. The theory of love has received extensive attention in the psychology literature however brand love, as distinct from romantic love, is a relatively new concept in the marketing literature, thus has received...