Dual Pathways of Loneliness in the Marketplace: Emotional Attachment, Empowerment, and Evaluations of Brand Warmth and Brand Competence

ABSTRACT Loneliness shapes consumer behavior, yet whether it increases preference for warm or competent brands remains unresolved. We argue that this question cannot be answered without distinguishing who is perceived to be lonely. Individual loneliness, which is a person's subjective experience of social disconnection, activates agency‐restoration motives, heightening empowerment needs and increasing preference for competence‐focused communications and brands perceived as capable. Collective loneliness, which is context‐level salience of shared disconnection, operates differently: it attenuates the relevance of agency restoration, reorders cue diagnosticity, and produces a relative preference for warmth‐focused communications and brands perceived as caring, mediated by emotional attachment. Across six studies (i.e., a national field study, an incentive‐aligned choice, a longitudinal brand‐level panel, and online experiments), we find consistent support for this dual‐pathway. These findings establish that loneliness is not a unitary predictor of warmth seeking; its effects on brand preferences depend critically on referent level. Managerially, firms can improve message effectiveness by matching competence‐ versus warmth‐focused communications to observable social context, without attempting to infer loneliness at the person level.