Executive Summary
This article proposes that consumers vary regarding their general engagement with brands and identifies this individual difference as “brand engagement in self-concept” (BESC). The authors develop a measure of this new construct and show that consumers indeed vary substantially in the degree to which they incorporate brands as part of their self-concept.
In five experiments, the authors examine how BESC affects important aspects of brand-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. Study 1 provides direct evidence regarding the underlying premise of BESC—namely, that favorite brands are differentially related to the self—by showing that self-brand associations in memory are stronger for people who are higher (versus lower) in BESC. Study 2 explores relationships among BESC, brand choices, and subsequent memory of branded possessions. This study finds that BESC predicts recall of brand names associated with material possessions. Study 3 investigates attention to brand stimuli by showing the ability of BESC to predict consumers’ brand perceptions based on incidental brand exposure in an everyday consumption situation. The influence of BESC on consumer product preferences is explored in Study 4, in which BESC’s influence on product attitudes is dependent on brand attitudes and the presence (or absence) of a brand logo. Brand loyalty in the context of new product introductions is the focus of Study 5 and is explored in terms of price and time insensitivity. This last study suggests that BESC is predictive of some important aspects of consumer brand loyalty.
This work provides important new insights regarding the proposition that consumers can and do create links between brands and their self-concepts. The authors demonstrate the importance of a general tendency for some consumers to engage their favorite brands in their self-concept. The empirical findings indicate that the BESC construct is valuable for the field of marketing because it meaningfully affects brand-related consumer constructs, including brand knowledge, attention, preference, and loyalty. This new construct and the attendant scale should prove valuable to further the understanding of the role of brands in consumers’ lives.
Biography
David Sprott is the Boeing/Scott and Linda Carson Chaired Professor of Marketing at Washington State University. He received his bachelor’s degree from Kent State University in 1990 and his MBA from Kent in 1992. He earned a PhD in Marketing, with an emphasis on psychology and consumer decision making, from the University of South Carolina in 1997. Professor Sprott’s research interests include various issues related to consumer decision making, social influence, consumer pricing, information provision, and marketing public policy. His research has been (or soon will be) published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Retailing, and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. In addition, his research has been presented at various national marketing, psychology, and public policy conferences.
Sandor Czellar is Assistant Professor in the Marketing Department of the HEC School of Management, Paris. He received his PhD in Management at the University of Geneva. Sandor Czellar’s research interests focus on the formation of brand attitudes, attitude measurement, and, more generally, the role of social influence in consumer psychology. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Marketing Letters. His research is regularly presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Consumer Psychology, Association for Consumer Research, and European Marketing Academy.
Eric Spangenberg, Professor of Marketing, joined the College of Business at Washington State University in 1990. He currently serves the college as dean and holds the Geoff and Florence Maughmer Freedom Philosophy Endowed Chair. Spangenberg is an alumnus of the Washington State University, having earned his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in 1982. He holds an MBA from Portland State University and a PhD in Marketing from the University of Washington. His areas of expertise include self-prophecy as an influence technique for encouraging socially desirable behaviors, measurement of unobservable constructs, and environmental psychology. Spangenberg is an award-winning teacher, and his widely cited publications include more than 25 refereed journal articles and an equal number of book chapters and refereed conference proceedings. Spangenberg’s research has been featured by numerous media outlets, including the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Learning Channel, The Early Show on CBS, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
J Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 1, February 2009
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