How Collaborative Marketing Communications and Aesthetic Design Influence Purchase Intention: The Sequential Mediating Roles of Nostalgic Emotion and Brand Love

This study investigates how aesthetic design and collaborative marketing shape consumer purchase intention through emotional and relational mechanisms in an emerging market setting. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) framework, the study develops and tests a moderated serial mediation model in which nostalgic emotion and brand love explain how marketing stimuli translate into behavioral outcomes. Data were collected from 326 Generation Y female consumers in Thailand and analyzed using structural equation modeling and conditional process analysis. The findings reveal that both aesthetic design and collaborative marketing positively influence nostalgic emotion, which subsequently strengthens brand love and enhances purchase intention. Brand love further emerges as a significant predictor of purchase intention, highlighting the importance of emotional attachment in consumer decision-making. Furthermore, aesthetic sensory consumption was found to moderate selected relationships within the proposed model rather than all structural paths, indicating that its influence is context dependent. However, although the sequential indirect effects through nostalgic emotion and brand love were significant at specific levels of aesthetic sensory consumption, pairwise comparisons revealed no significant differences across these levels. Thus, the hypothesized moderated sequential indirect effects were not supported. This study extends promotion management research by explaining how aesthetic design and collaborative marketing function as complementary promotional mechanisms that stimulate nostalgic emotion, strengthen brand love, and enhance purchase intention, while identifying aesthetic sensory consumption as a selective boundary condition rather than a uniform moderator of the sequential mechanism.