What Really Drives Customer-Brand Relationships? Evidence from an Emerging Market: An Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, one emerging stream of research has drawn on social identity theory to examine customer-brand relationships as captured by the customers’ identification with brands, which refers to the overlapping between the customer’s identity and the brand’s identity and underscores the self-definitional values of the brand (Dimitriadis and Papista 2011; Lam et al. 2012). But research mostly neglected a critical notion of this social psychological theory that customers can categorize themselves into social groups and then adjust their self through socially interacting with others (Tajfel 2010). Accordingly, this study incorporates the other symbolic aspect of the brand that is socially adjustive underlain by important social comparison processes, as well as addresses the important question whether a brand’s symbolic values are sufficiently motivating customer-brand relationships by examining the linkages between brand identification, social adjustive, sense of brand community, and relationship-related behavioral outcomes (sustaining and promoting behaviors). This is significant since the relative importance between identification with brand and with social group may be bound by cultures (Fournier et al. 2012). The results of a survey of 400 fashion clothing customers in the emerging market context of Vietnam revealed that sense of brand community, which taps into the customer’s perceptions of relational bonds with the community of brand users/admirers (Carlson et al. 2008), mediates the effects of brand identification and social adjustive on relationship-related behavioral outcomes. Additional analyses on the direct effects of brand identification and social adjustive on behavioral outcomes provided insignificant results at p < 0.05. In addition, perceived value and hedonic value, tapping into, respectively, the perceived brand’s utility and ability to evoke positive emotions, were also found to have strong effects on behavioral outcomes directly. With the integration of utilitarian, hedonic, and symbolic influences on behavioral outcomes, the implications deduced from the findings can provide marketers with directions to devise effective relationship-building strategies to achieve marketing performance. A brand may only serve as a rallying point around which the brand community is created. Customer’s perceived own fit into an important group or receipt of social approval may be the condition for the customers to sustain and foster their relationships with the brand community and brand relationships. Apart from symbolism-related values, the core of marketing is to provide product or service that provides customers with utility and hedonic experience. Further research is warranted in other market contexts (including emerging ones) and with other product categories.