Development of Chinese consumers' brand love conceptual structure and scale: With sports shoes brands as an example

Abstract

In brand consumption era, establishing close brand-consumer emotional relationship and cultivating consumers' love to brands are effective to enhance market competitiveness. Understanding brand love connotation and structure is a premise and basis for systematically developing brand love research. Based on western consumers' brand love concept theory, this paper takes Chinese consumers' psychological features into account, establishes Chinese consumers' brand love conceptual structure, develops a brand love scale and empirically tests it with sports' shoes brands. The result shows that, (1) Chinese consumers' brand love consists of three dimensions named brand satisfaction and trust, brand passion, brand attachment; (2) Chinese consumers' brand love structure is different from western consumers' band love structure, the difference can be explained by objective difference in culture, consumption habits, commercial environment between China and western countries. This research provides theoretical basis for subsequent brand love research and practical guide for enterprises successfully incubating brand love in China.