Brand relationships and switching behaviour for highly used products in young consumers

Abstract

Consumer-brand relationships is an evolving area of study. The purpose of this study is to: • establish that brand relationships postulated in the literature exist along all dimensions for young consumers in the emerging market context • investigate the influence of peers, family, and brand relationships on switching intentions amongst young consumers • examine the impact of price changes on switching intentions in the context of brand relationships. This is an empirical study focusing on the brand relationships amongst young consumers in the age range of 13 to 25 years in an emerging economy. Data were collected from 214 respondents from the SEC A and B categories in a city in Western India through a questionnaire administered in the presence of the researchers. The results indicate that: • young consumers do form relationships with brand(s) on all the six dimensions of consumer brand relationship that have been postulated in the literature • love and passion dimension of brand relationship is stronger amongst teenagers as compared to young adults. The second part of the paper looks at the influence of the social groups like family and peers on the switching behaviour in presence of brand relationship dimensions where, we found that family has a relatively stronger influence than peers. Finally, it looks at the effect of price comparison on brand relationship. It is found that consumers do compare price irrespective of how strong the brand relationship is. This may be an artifact of the higher price consciousness in the Indian environment that is found amongst consumers across income groups. The future directions and limitations are discussed at the end.