ABSTRACT
A central value-creating mechanism in the marketing arsenal is the brand: the entity through and with which close connections with consumers are established. Decades of academic research have sought insight into the nature of consumers’ brand connections and the mechanisms that govern them such that brand value can be captured by the firm. Practical theoretical insights have been sought using many disciplinary lenses—psychological, sociological, cultural, and economic—and our knowledge about brands from the psychology perspective is especially deep. In this disciplinary realm, brand connections are conceptualized using the construct of attitude: summary evaluative judgments of a target object that are qualified by properties of valence (positive, negative, neutral) and strength (Fazio, 1986). Attitudes comprise webs of associations that variously include cognitive (beliefs and knowledge), affective (evaluative), and behavioral components (Fazio, 1990). Keller’s oft-cited customer-based brand equity paradigm (1993) builds squarely from attitudinal frameworks to offer managers insight into building brands.
