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ABSTRACT
Brands, like humans, can serve as legitimate relationship partners. Brand relationships can provide consumers with resources in making decisions, meeting their needs, and motivating them. Marketers are using social media as a way to promote their brands and build consumer brand relationships. This research examines how emotional, or affect-based brand relationships, are developed in online social communities. It explores this phenomenon in the context of personal branding for music artists and uses Facebook as a social medium. A conceptual model is developed and empirically tested. Findings indicate that emotional relationships are cultivated by the intimacy and self-connection a consumer has toward the brand, or artist. This intimacy and connection can lead to an emotionally based attachment and bond, or affective commitment. Strong affective commitment from the consumer can be extremely valuable to the branded artist and his/her music because it leads to loyalty in the form of purchase behavior, reduced digital piracy, support of artistic vision and advocacy for the artist. However, value co-creation also plays an important role in developing emotionally based brand relationships and value-co-creation interacts with the impact of affective commitment on loyalty and advocacy. Implications for marketers managing brands and consumer brand relationships are discussed.
Keywords: Affective commitment; Brand relationships; Social media; Emotion
1. Introduction
Brands comprise both physical and socio-psychological attributes. Brands can imbue unique meaning to consumers and such meaning and personal experience with a brand can create a connection, or relationship, between the consumer and the brand. Fournier [1994; 1998] was one of the first to conceptualize consumer brand relationships. In this metaphor, a consumer and a brand are theorized as being in a dyadic relationship similar to a relationship between two people. Subsequently, brand relationships can help consumers develop and communicate something about who they are, who they were, or who they aspire to be.
Currently, marketers are using social media as a way to promote their brands and build these consumer brand relationships [Chen et al. 2011]. Social communities such as Facebook, Twitter, Four Square, and LinkedIn are channels of social media focused on relationships, shared interest and identification. These communities feature multi-way communication, conversion and collaboration [Tuten and Solomon 2012]. Brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, PlayStation, Oreos and McDonalds actively use online social communities...