Human Brands: Investigating Antecedents to Consumers' Strong Attachments to Celebrities

This article explores recent advances in self-determination research to address why consumers develop strong attachments to "human brands," a term that refers to any well-known persona who is the subject of marketing communications efforts. Study 1 uses a survey that is analyzed with struc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of marketing 2006-07, Vol.70 (3), p.104-119
Main Author: Thomson, Matthew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brands
Celebrities
Consumer attitudes
Consumer psychology
Consumer research
Consumers
Emotional attachments
Marketing
Self actualization
Self esteem
Social interaction
Statistical analysis
Studies
Sumer
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Summary:This article explores recent advances in self-determination research to address why consumers develop strong attachments to "human brands," a term that refers to any well-known persona who is the subject of marketing communications efforts. Study 1 uses a survey that is analyzed with structural equation modeling. Study 2 is qualitative and offers corroborating evidence for the proposed theoretical model. Study 3 extends the model with a more naturalistic sample and tests several alternative hypotheses using hierarchical regression. The results suggest that when a human brand enhances a person's feelings of autonomy and relatedness and does not suppress feelings of competence, the person is likely to become more strongly attached to it. This article documents that strong attachments are predictive of satisfied, trusting, and committed relationships and proposes that attachment strength may be a parsimonious proxy for consumer-brand relationship strength. The results imply that benefits would accrue to organizations such as entertainment firms and political parties that establish direct and routine interaction between human brands and consumers, that human brands to which consumers are attached offer significant potential as endorsers, and that organizations should address how to make the human brands they manage more authentic.
ISSN:0022-2429
1547-7185
DOI:10.1509/jmkg.70.3.104