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This study aims to examine the impact of consumer brand experience on brand love and loyalty toward a favorite tequila brand across Mexico and the USA while advancing marketing strategies to strengthen consumer-brand relationships.

Data were analyzed from 906 respondents (348-USA and 558-Mexico) to assess paths to purchase loyalty and test brand relationship hypotheses using partial least squares.

Analysis revealed that consumers in both markets demonstrated similar paths from tequila experience to brand love and attitude toward their favorite tequila brand. On the contrary, significant differences in the influence of tequila experience on the brand image were evident. Tequila experience did not have a significant difference between markets on purchase loyalty. Attitude toward the tequila brand had a much stronger influence on brand image for the USA compared to Mexican respondents. Finally, brand love’s influence on purchase loyalty differed significantly between the two markets of respondents.

Considering different paths to behavioral brand loyalty across markets enables segmentation strategy development to increase repeat purchase and brand allegiance. Results indicate that the brand's image is a strong influencer of purchase loyalty, suggesting opportunities exist for brand managers to consider unique paths toward purchase loyalty.

This study advances the literature by answering the call for multi-national studies that investigate consumer-brand relationships. Furthermore, the research setting offers insight into consumer-brand relationships and consumption patterns for spirits in a different national context, in this case, the product’s country of origin (Mexico) and its largest market (USA).

This study aims to address how the social structure of the hospitality management field has evolved from 1960 to 2016.

The informal social structure of the hospitality management literature was analyzed by collecting authorship data from seven hospitality management journals. Co-authorship analyses via network analysis were conducted.

According to the findings, throughout the history of hospitality management, international collaboration levels are relatively low. Based on social network analysis, the research community is only loosely connected, and the network of the community does not fit with the small-world network theory. Additional findings indicate that researchers in the hospitality management literature are ranked via degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality. Cliques, which contain at least five researchers, and core researchers are identified.

This study helps both scholars and practitioners improve the informal structure of the field. Scholars must generate strong ties to strengthen cross-fertilization in the field; hence, they collaborate with authors who have strong positions in the field. Specifically, this provides a useful performance analysis. To the extent that institutions and individuals are rewarded for publications, this study demonstrates the performance and connectivity of several key researchers in the field. This finding could be interesting to (post)graduate students. Hospitality managers looking for advisors and consultants could benefit from the findings. Additionally, these are beneficial for journal editors, junior researchers and agencies/institutions.

As one of the first study in the field, this research examines the informal social structure of hospitality management literature in seven journals.