Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer...

Marketing managers and consumers who use the web as a source of information often use input from strangers to make decisions or gain knowledge. The authors propose that in such contexts the information provider's current and past behaviors, relative to those of other information providers,...

Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark-bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet-loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste; sour-sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and...

We review a growing body of research in consumer behavior that has examined when consumers humanize brands by perceiving them as like, part of, or in a relationship with themselves. One research stream shows that sometimes consumers perceive brands as having human-like forms, minds, and...

Although attachment theorists have examined the attachment concept in diverse relationship contexts (romantic relationship, kinship, and friendship, etc.), the nomological network of the construct has not been fully delineated. The purpose of the present paper is to develop this nomological...

This chapter examines three key issues in developing and establishing strong brand relationships with its customers. The first issue addresses the concept of attachment as a distinctive higher order construct that bears critical implications for the enhancement of brand equity. The second key...