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Abstract:
This chapter examines three key issues in developing and establishing strong brand relationships with its customers. The first issue addresses the concept of attachment as a distinctive higher order construct that bears critical implications for the enhancement of brand equity. The second key issue addresses how a brand may be able to create a meaningful personal connection with its customers in order to create and establish brand attachment. Here, three different brand-self associations are introduced. The third and final issue addresses the importance of the strategic brand exemplar as the most fundamental tool that offers a firm valuable opportunity for the brand's sustainable competitive advantages and growth. The essential requirement for this opportunity to be realized is the firm's strategic choice of a brand's exemplar and the carefully executed strategy to manage the exemplar over time so as to nurture and accumulate its effects.

brand attachment, strategic brand exemplar

Abstract:
Although attachment theorists have examined the attachment concept in diverse relationship contexts (romantic relationship, kinship, and friendship, etc.), the nomological network of the construct has not been fully delineated. The purpose of the present paper is to develop this nomological network. We define brand attachment as the strength of the cognitive and emotional bond connecting the brand with the self. This definition involves two unique and essential elements: (1) connectedness between the brand and the self and (2) a cognitive and emotional bond, the strength of which evokes a readiness to allocate one's processing resources toward a brand. We examined factors that create brand attachment, the effects of brand attachment on higher order relationship-based exchange behaviors, why attachments (and hence relationships) weaken or terminate, and how they may be measured.

brand attachment, nomological network

Abstract:
The authors introduce the concept of affective misforecasting (AMF) and study its impact on product evaluations. Study one examines whether and when AMF affects evaluations, finding that AMF impacts evaluations when the affective experience is worse (but not when better) than forecasted. Study two tests a process model designed to understand how and why AMF influences evaluations. The extent of elaboration is shown to underlie the observed effects. The studies demonstrate the robustness of the findings by controlling for alternative factors, specifically experienced affect, expectancy-disconfirmation, and actual performance, which might impact these judgments.

affect, forecasting

Abstract:
While comprehensive in nature, Cohen and Reed's integrative attitude model may benefit from an articulation of the boundaries of the attitude construct. As evidence, the present comment focuses on the extent to which attitudes can or should account for hot affect-based brand relationships and stronger forms of behaviors consumers reveal with their brands. The authors recommend that from the boundary conditions of the attitude construct can be elucidated by differentiating attitudes from a construct termed "emotional attachment". Potential differences between these two constructs are articulated.

attitude, attachment, brand relationship