A New Consumer Brand Relationships Framework

The creation of brand-based differentiation is the most influential approach to the development and maintenance of competitive advantage, particularly a consumer-focused competitive advantage. For consumers, these differential aspects may act as a signal of achieving expectation, which will provide more confidence and believability that the brand will meet their expectations (Kim et al., 2008). The extant literature on consumer brand management has examined these differentiating aspects, based on which consumers perceive and evaluate brands, for example, brand equity (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1998), brand personality (Aaker, 1997; Batra et al., 1993; Plummer, 1985), and brand extensions (Aaker and Keller, 1993; Nakamoto et al., 1993). Recently, a new stream of literature stated that consumers differentiate brands based on how they relate to them (Fournier, 1998), and this gave rise to a new area of thinking, called consumer brand relationships (CBRs) (e.g., Fournier, 1998; McAlexander et al., 2002; Parvatiyar and Sheth, 2001; Webster, 1992).