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INTRODUCTION
Marketing has traditionally focused on the physical aspects of products and services, such as functionality, price, availability or quality (Mascarenhas et al , 2006). However, research has shown that consumers no longer simply buy products or services (Morrison and Crane, 2007). In fact, some years ago, marketing scholars already began to point out that marketing should shift its focus and take into consideration other elements such as relationship management (Berry, 1983; Jackson, 1985) and value creation (Webster, 1994; Ravald and Gronroos, 1996). More recently, marketing academics and practitioners have realized that, in the present environment, customer experience is the key issue to be managed (Pine and Gilmore, 1998; Schmitt, 1999; Berry et al , 2002).
Brand experiences are a set of sensations, feelings, cognitions and behavioural responses that are evoked by many different stimuli which occur when customers directly or indirectly interact with a certain brand (Brakus et al , 2009). It has been proposed that brands capable of delivering a unique and distinctive experience by managing both the functional and emotional elements of the offering (Berry et al , 2002; Haeckel et al , 2003; Morrison and Crane, 2007) and assuring consistency in all touchpoints between the brand and its customers (Shaw and Ivens, 2002; Meyer and Schwager, 2007) can build brand loyalty and even generate evangelism (Schmitt, 2003; Pullman and Gross, 2004; Deming, 2007).
Researchers have argued that true brand loyalty is different from spurious loyalty in that it is not just driven by situational exigencies such as price or convenience (Dick and Basu, 1994; Kumar and Advani, 2005) and that it requires a certain previous degree of affective psychological attachment in order to be developed (Punniyamoorthy and Prasanna, 2007; Lin, 2010).
Based on the literature, it is argued that consumers with greater brand experiences will develop higher levels of brand loyalty. Furthermore, it is suggested that this relationship is mostly mediated by affective commitment.
Theoretical framework
See Figure 1 - See PDF,.
Brand experience, affective commitment and brand loyalty
'Experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods' (Pine and Gilmore, 1998, p. 12). From the brand management viewpoint, an experience is a takeaway impression (Carbone and Haeckel, 1994) that is formed in the mind...