Forging emotional brand attachment: the role of fear arousal

Purpose This research aims to examine how fear-based stimuli can forge emotional brand attachment, offering a novel emotional pathway for strengthening consumer-brand relationships. Design/methodology/approach Three laboratory experiments across product categories exposed participants to fear-based stimuli. A moderated mediation model tested the effects of fear arousal and the presence of a previously attached brand. Findings Fear arousal, a consumer’s emotional reaction to fear-based stimuli, serves as a key mediator that links exposure to such stimuli with emotional brand attachment. Notably, this process holds even when the consumer is accompanied by a previously attached brand. While such brands reduce the level of fear arousal, they do not interrupt the positive link between arousal and attachment, indicating that both new and existing brands can benefit from fear-based stimulus contexts. Research limitations/implications All studies were conducted in lab settings. Future research should explore whether these findings generalize to real-world environments and other high-arousal emotions. Practical implications This study identifies fear arousal as a novel emotional mechanism driving brand attachment and introduces preexisting brand attachment as a boundary condition. These insights enrich understanding of how fear-based stimuli shape consumer-brand bonds. Originality/value This study demonstrates that a negative, high-arousal emotion can drive emotional brand attachment through a purely affective pathway, challenging the prevailing assumption that affective antecedents of emotional brand attachment operate through positive emotional states, and offering an empirically grounded alternative to the cognitive mechanism proposed by Dunn and Hoegg (2014). It further reveals that the emotion-regulatory and relationship-building functions of brands in fear-based contexts are cooccurring rather than competing processes and provides the proximal mechanistic explanation for why emotionally intense brand encounters initiate attachment formation.