You've Got a Friend in Me: Including the Brand in the Self through Brand Relationships

Abstract

Brand relationship literature assumes that consumers draw little distinction between the relationships consumers have with brands and those they have with people. However, are brand relationships and human relationships really so similar? This research builds on the application of the Self Expansion Model (Aron & Aron, 1986) to brand relationship theory by revealing an indirect effect and a boundary condition to explain how and when brand relationships influence the pattern of resource allocation strategies that reflect a cognitive merging of “self” and “brand” thereby demonstrating a departure from the resource allocation strategies of interpersonal relationships (Aron et al., 1991).