Deciphering Consumer Commitment: Exploring the Dual Influence of Self-Brand and Self-Group Relationships

Consumer-brand relationships are highly valued as brand-committed consumers are thought to deliver many positive outcomes for affiliated brands. However, in addition to connections between individuals and brands, consumer-brand relationships also involve relationships between individuals and other brand users. Little attention has been given to the potential consequences associated with commitment to other brand users as compared to the brand itself. Therefore, our framework establishes two distinct types of consumer-brand relationships (i.e., self-brand relationships vs. self-group relationships) that differentially influence brand commitment versus group commitment, leading to contrasting effects on both desirable and undesirable brand outcomes. Specifically, our studies illuminate that while brand commitment is largely associated with favorable brand-related outcomes, group commitment does not protect against brand switching and is negatively related to willingness to pay price premiums and positive word-of-mouth. Our main contribution is uncovering how consumer-brand relationships face tradeoffs between brand and group attachments, whereby commitment provides both conditional benefits as well as unintended consequences

“I Thought My Idea to Use Your Idea Was a Great Idea”: Inadvertent Plagiarism in Marketing

Cryptomnesia (i.e., inadvertent plagiarism) occurs when an individual believes that an idea from an external source is their own unique creation, and this can negatively impact marketers involved with creative activities. While several factors can influence whether an individual attends to the source of an idea during encoding and memory retrieval, cryptomnesia has been surprisingly overlooked within an advertising context. The purpose of this research note is to introduce the concept of cryptomnesia to advertising, explore cultural distance as a previously untested antecedent, and examine the effect of cryptomnesia on consumer evaluations. We conduct three experiments that provide evidence for how greater cultural distance is associated with increased cryptomnesia in advertising—although being in a flow state can attenuate this effect—resulting in decreased consumer attitudes, cognitions, and behavioral intentions

A customer-focused approach to improve celebrity endorser effectiveness

The current study reveals that a customer-focused approach to choosing celebrity endorsers (based on consumer-endorser identification) is a more useful predictor of endorsement success than a product-focused approach (product-endorser fit) alone. Specifically, the findings suggest consumer-endorser identification offers a potentially more consistent criterion for predicting endorsement effectiveness than fit, which is contingent upon varying consumer perceptions of product-endorser match-up. Across two studies, one survey-based and one longitudinal experiment, increased identification with both male and female endorsers led to increases in endorsement success. Most importantly, the influence of identification is significant for both high and low fit pairings between an endorser and brand. Thus, consumers who identify strongly with an endorser are likely to respond favorably to the endorsement even when fit between the endorser and brand is poor. Moreover, identification with the endorser is found to be consistently linked to purchase intentions over multiple time points