Effects of brand love, personality and image on word of mouth: The case of fashion brands among young consumers

Abstract

Fashion brand love is a central concept in the consumer-brand relationship domain. Brand managers tend to create more lovable brands, e.g. McDonald's “I’m lovin it”. However, the importance of this concept is not frequently discussed in marketing literature. Furthermore, the impact of brand personality and brand image on brand love has not been investigated in any empirical research. This paper aims to address this gap by developing a causal model incorporating brand love, brand personality, brand image and word of mouth (WOM) to investigate the relationships among them. Data were collected using a survey method and usable questionnaires were completed by 250 undergraduate students. Path analysis was used to test the hypotheses using AMOS 16.0. Results revealed that only brand image is considered as a determinant of brand love that affects WOM along with brand personality. Results provide detailed implications and a platform on which future research can be built. The extant love research seems to be solely in the US context. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the concept of brand love outside the USA. © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited