Abstract (eng)
Following the growing importance of brands as relationship partners (Fournier, 1998), international marketing literature has shown significant interest in research focusing on consumer-brand relationships. As a result, consumer-brand identification (CBI) (Stokburger-Sauer, Ratneshwar & Sen, 2012) has recently drawn the attention of marketing academics. Despite growing interest, there is still a lack of research on the antecedents of CBI. More specifically the current state of research focuses mainly on brand-specific factors (Stokburger-Sauer et al., 2012) or external influences (Einwiller, Fedorikhin, Johnson & Kamins, 2006) as drivers of CBI, but little is known about the role consumer characteristics or other customers play in this regard. Naming other customers in this context, a growing body of research is also devoted to the stereotypical perceptions of brands (BS) and brand buyers (BBS) and how they individually influence CBI (Kolbl, Arslanagic-Kalajdzic & Diamantopoulos, 2019), but a possible transfer from brands to their respective buyers has yet to be investigated. Against this background, the present study investigates (a) if there is a transfer of stereotypical assessments of brands on the perceptions of their respective buyers and through it on CBI. In addition, (b) the moderating role of customer-to-customer similarity on the latter link is examined in order to understand its boundary conditions. Drawing on stereotype research and theory of uniqueness, (c) the impact of brand-related stereotypes and consumers’ need for uniqueness (CNFU) as individual consumer characteristic on CBI is investigated and finally (d) which is the stronger driver under the prediction of self-construal. In order to achieve this, an online survey with 560 German participants from an online consumer panel was conducted. In the study, respondents were randomly exposed to one out of 60 global brands from different product categories and the results indicate that (a) BS transfers to BBS on both stereotypical dimensions, (b) customer-to-customer similarity strengthens the effect of BBS on CBI, (c) BS warmth, both dimensions of BBS and two dimensions of CNFU positively impact CBI, and finally, (d) for highly independent consumers CNFU is the stronger driver, but for highly interdependent ones it is BBS. Overall, this research study generates theoretical insights about consumer-specific antecedents of CBI from different perspectives and provides important managerial implications for global brands.