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This study aims to examine the underlying antecedents and psychological mechanisms through which brand's communication of sustainable business practices in social media influences consumers' responsible consumption behaviour and brand relationship outcomes.

Data were collected using two surveys, from a sample of WhatsApp users (N = 632), and a sample of Facebook users (N = 471), and were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling.

The results suggest that systematic and heuristic processing of message cues about sustainable business practices communicated by the brand through online social networks influence consumers' perceptions of brand warmth and competence. These perceptions, in turn, direct consumers' responsible consumption behaviours and strengthen brand relationships. The impact of these cues is moderated by consumers' perception of the brand's motives for engaging in sustainable business practices.

The study insights can help brand managers to enhance consumers' brand-related perceptions, responsible consumption and consumer-brand relationships.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the impact of technology-enabled service co-creation on patients' service patronage behaviour in healthcare retailing. The first objective is to examine the mediating roles of spatial presence and co-presence in the relationship between technology enabled co-creation and service experience. The second objective is to investigate if healthcare service experience impacts patients' relationship value with hospitals and subsequent patronage intention.

Data were collected from a sample of 516 customers of three leading hospitals in India during the social isolation period of COVID-19. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The study results demonstrate that customers' favourably perceived technology-enabled co-creation generates feelings of spatial presence and co-presence in the technology-enabled platform. The feeling of presence enhances patients' health care service experiences which in turn predict their relationship value perceptions towards the healthcare service provider. Co-presence dominates as a mediator in terms of magnitude over spatial presence. The favourable value perception positively impacts patients' intention to come back to the same hospital.

The study uses cross-sectional data, which does not incorporate any temporal variations in the investigated relationships. The study does not account for differences in government vs. private undertakings of healthcare system.

The findings envisage a digital healthcare retail system, where hospitals can enhance patients' perceptions of healthcare service experience, relational value and re-patronage intention, based on the digital mediated environment design elements, i.e. spatial presence and co-presence. As co-presence is a dominant factor, ensuring that human healthcare experts (rather than technology based e-service elements like chatbots) participate in healthcare service co-creation is of prime importance to provide enriching service experience to the patients.

The value of the research lies in extending the theories of presence, UTAUT and S-O-R to understand digital healthcare retailing, in order to identify the mechanism of how online co-creative platform can generate hospital patronage behaviour among patients through the serial mediation of presence, augmented service experience and relationship value.

This paper aims to investigate how consumers’ satisfaction and commitment towards hotel brands can be impacted by the consumers’ prevailing brand relationship norms.

Data were collected through experimental design and analysed using MANCOVA, structural equation modelling and Preacher and Hayes’ (2008) techniques.

The study findings indicate that the egoistic norms positively impact brand attachment styles/orientations, and the attachment orientations in turn negatively impact hotel brand satisfaction and commitment through the mediation of brand trust. Findings also reveal that altruistic norms have no significant impact on the attachment styles, but altruism impacts brand trust positively, which in turn positively impacts satisfaction and commitment.

This research adds value by examining how different consumer–brand association norms differently impact final brand satisfaction and commitment outcomes through creating healthy versus detrimental consumer–brand attachments.

This study aims to investigate how the influences of store loyalty programs on store loyalty and store relations can be mediated by the store satisfaction-love framework.

The survey data were collected from selected retail stores using stratified random sampling. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that the impacts of store loyalty programs on store loyalty and store relations are mediated both by store love and store satisfaction.

This study’s findings help practitioners by empirically demonstrating that the combined cognitive satisfaction of consumers with store loyalty programs and affective store love mediate the influences of loyalty programs on consumer loyalty toward the store and on the consumer–store relation. Therefore, cognitive satisfaction with loyalty programs alone cannot create strong loyalty and a customer relationship. Cognitive satisfaction with various loyalty programs must be converted into affective store love for the mediation to be significant and effective.

This research adds value to the domain of store loyalty research by empirically establishing the mediating role played by the cognitive satisfaction-affective love framework in shaping the influences of loyalty programs designed by store management on the final store loyalty and customer–store relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of online advertising on advertising message involvement (AMI) and brand attitude formation among adolescent consumers. More specifically, the impact of advertising copy type and individual task orientation on brand attitude is examined through the mediating role of AMI among a sample of adolescents in India. Moderating role of product’s technology intensiveness is also examined.

Experimental design with three-way factorial analysis of variance was conducted along with independent t-tests and regressions.

The results show that the effect of ad copy type and individual task orientation on brand attitude is mediated by AMI. While both narrative and factual ad copies are found to increase AMI among the respondents, narrative ad copies generate greater AMI when compared with factual ad copies, irrespective of respondents’ task orientation or technology intensiveness of the product. Managerial insights regarding the type of online advertising that would generate a greater AMI and more favorable brand attitude among adolescent consumers are discussed.

The contribution of this research lies in providing the empirical evidence regarding the type of online advertising that can help marketers generate a greater AMI and cultivate more favorable brand attitude among the adolescent consumers.

The purpose of this study was to conceptualize consumer’s luxury brand aspiration and develop a psychometrically reliable scale to measure the construct. This study aims to extend the existing research in luxury branding domain through validating a scale to measure consumer’s luxury brand aspiration.

Initially, the dimensions of consumer’s luxury brand aspiration were identified through prior literature review and qualitative investigations. This was followed by a series of scale development studies suggested by Churchill (1979).

The results supported that the second-order measure of consumer’s luxury brand aspiration consist of four related first-order dimensions, namely, identity signaling, social recognition, self-esteem and achievement signaling. Luxury brand aspiration was found to have direct positive influences on brand commitment and brand attachment. Brand commitment and attachment in turn significantly influence intention to pay price premium.

Value of this research article lies in validating a scale to measure individual’s luxury brand aspiration for the first time in branding literature.

Research investigating brand devotion among young consumers is scarce particularly in emerging Asian market context. The objective of this study was to qualitatively explore the evolutionary process leading to brand devotion amongst the young Indian consumers.

Semi-structured depth interviews were conducted to collect data. Data was analyzed using grounded theory method.

The grounded theory framework developed shows single brand devotion in a product category as the key phenomenon along with the associated factors and evolutionary processes.

This study explores how single brand devotion is distinct from romantic brand love, as experienced by consumers. Value of this article also lies in developing a grounded theory framework for single brand devotion in emerging Asian market context.

The purpose of the present paper is to develop and validate a scale of romantic brand jealousy and to examine the role played by the brand love-jealousy framework on consumers' active engagement.

In order to develop and validate the romantic brand jealousy scale the present study has employed Churchill's methodology. The study has used common factor analysis and structural equation modeling using LISREL 8.72.

This research provides empirical evidence for a three-item romantic brand jealousy scale. The study results indicate that the romantic jealousy scale developed is valid and reliable. It also shows that in contrast to previous literature, wherein authors found that brand love would create customer engagement, the brand love-jealousy framework would act as a better mediator to create customer engagement and also to motivate the customer to purchase the brand.

This research was conducted in a specific country (India). It would be more robust if the scale developed by this study could be examined in the context of other countries.

This study is expected to help managers to formulate a better marketing strategy to increase customer engagement using the proposed brand love-jealousy framework.

This research adds value to the domain of consumer psychology research by proposing that brand jealousy needs to be created along with brand love in customer's mind to augment the level of active engagement.

The purpose of this paper was to uncover various factors that make the young consumers in emerging Asian market devotees of brands and sacrilize brands giving rise to a phenomenon called brand sacralization where the individual consumer considers brand as sacred as religion. Another objective of this research was to investigate the acculturation process taking place among the young adult consumers in emerging Asian market.

Based on prior literature review, the concept of brand sacralization has been defined to bring theoretical sensitivity. Grounded theory method has been used to collect, analyze and interpret the data collected through semi-structured depth interviews.

Data analysis reveals various underlying dimensions of brand sacralization and various actionable antecedents and consequence of brand sacralization.

Value of the article lies in developing a grounded theory framework for brand sacralization that can guide the marketers doing business in emerging markets to build a strong brand that the consumers would sacralize.