Higher-Order Utilitarian and Symbolic Antecedents of Brand Love and Consumers’ Behavioral Consequences for Smartphones

Abstract

Using the categorization theory, this study explores the effects of higher-order functional and symbolic benefits on brand love (BL). It further studies the relationships between BL and consumers’ behavioral responses (positive word-of-mouth, willingness to pay a price premium, resistance to negative information and brand loyalty). The data were collected from 321 smartphone users, applying cross-sectional design, and analyzed by PLS-Structural Equation Modeling. The results show that perceived functional and symbolic benefits significantly predict consumer’s love for smartphone brands. Moreover, BL significantly mediates the relationships between higher-order antecedents and behavioral outcomes. This study theoretically contributes to the BL literature by establishing the generalizability of BL measure and reassuring the universality of its consequences in the Asian context for smartphone users.

Keywords:

• Brand love
• functional benefits
• symbolic benefits
• brand loyalty
• premium prices
• resistance

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 Rauschnabel and Ahuvia (2014) and Bagozzi et al. (2017) found that seventh dimension “Attitude Strength 2” was not significant with remaining constructs of BL. Since the respondents did not consider it a part of BL construct in their study so, we did not include it in our study.

2 Bagozzi et al. (2017) used BL as a single factor in their study by computing the averages of items. Alternatively, we used factor scores of first and second order constructs to ensure more representation of variance measured in the BL construct (Hair et al., 2009; Tabachnick and Fidell, 2013).