Consumer-brand relationship development in the automotive market: an integrative model

The nature of consumer-brand relationships (CBR) represents one of the topics with the most significant literary resonance in contemporary marketing. However, there is still a gap of a well-defined, integrated, and empirically tested model explaining the causal relationships of CBR's development stages. This study aims to explore and bridge this knowledge gap in the automotive market setting. In this sense, a survey of 427 consumers was carried out. The interrelated factors of the successive stages showed adequate levels of variance explanation. As word of mouth grows in importance, due to the spread of digital social networks, the research's results suggest that the development of attachment/love should become a primordial challenge to develop consumer-brand relationships. The main knowledge contribution of this research is the test of an integrated CBR model focused on the automotive market. The final CBR model reflects a fair level of consistency and provides a useful basis for practitioners to plan in detail actions that will engage consumers and manufacturer's brands.