Brand Love: Exploring Relationships With Environment, Social, Governance (E.S.G.) and Brand Purpose

The advancing concept of Brand Love has received a lot of attention from managers as well as from academicians (Batra et al., 2012). Organizations are particularly concerned to understand the notion (Palusuk et al., 2019), as liking and satisfaction from consumer side towards a brand are not sufficient to build a long-term customer-brand relationship (Jones & Sasser, 1995). According to Fournier (1998) the principal element of customer-brand relationship is love, which is further cultivated with live cases by Roberts (2004) in his book ‘Lovemarks’. Research implies that love towards an object is possible when a consumer purchases an object, engages with it, and expresses the thoughts and feelings toward the object to make it distinct than other brands of similar nature while also linking it as having human like aspects (Palusuk & Kitchen, 2015). Largely, consumer expresses the attachment as the brand represents them and such emotional attachment is elaborated as to be a long-term relationship rather than a short span affection-based emotion (Batra et al., 2012). Understanding such attachment and it’s outcomes is of crucial importance for brands in emerging markets, where managers critically depend on various one-sided communication stunts such as, social interactive engagement led by social influencers rather than user generated content, which proves to be more effective (Welbourne & Grant, 2015). Thus, this investigation leads to practical contributions for brand managers and for academic researchers seeking to explore customer-brand relationships, specifically brand love.