WHY GO THE EXTRA MILE FOR APPLE? A DIVE INTO BRAND LOVE AND BRAND JEALOUSY

Abstract

Shifting brand strategies increasingly emphasize fostering emotional connections, such as brand love and brand jealousy, to enhance consumers’ willingness to pay a premium. Although extensive research has examined these emotional constructs, their relevance in the “masstige” context—brands that combine mass appeal with prestige, exemplified by Apple—remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how brand experience and self-expressiveness act as antecedents to brand love and brand jealousy, which subsequently influence willingness to pay a premium, framed through the lens of attribution theory. Data were collected from 378 Indonesian Apple users through offline and online surveys and analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling with AMOS software version 24. The results demonstrate that brand experience significantly strengthens both brand love and brand jealousy, thereby enhancing consumer-brand relationships. While self-expressiveness also contributes to both emotional constructs, its impact is comparatively weaker than that of brand experience. Both brand love and brand jealousy were found to positively influence consumers’ willingness to pay a premium. This study presents a comprehensive model linking emotional bonds to consumer spending behavior in the masstige context, providing actionable insights for brand managers to enhance emotional connections and drive premium pricing strategies.