نقش شناسایی نام تجاری-مصرف کننده در ایجاد روابط نام تجاری (برند)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate relationships between congruity of consumer and brand values, brand identification, brand commitment, and word of mouth. The results show that congruity of consumer and brand values tends to have positive influence on consumers' identification. Consumers who identify with a brand tend to commit stronger to a brand and generate positive word of mouth. The results show that consumers' identification fully mediates the impact of value congruity on brand commitment. However, brand commitment does not mediate the impact of consumers' identification on generating positive word of mouth.

For decades, brands have been crucial for building relationships with consumers assuring long-term business success. In the time of great consumer skepticism toward brands, coupled with the fall in value of traditional media in promoting brands and the current global economic crisis, questions concerning consumer–brand identification have become even more important for brand management. Here, consumer–brand identification refers to the individual's sense of sameness with a particular brand. Despite growing awareness, scholars (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003 and Tildesley and Coote, 2009) argue that there is still much to learn about the role of consumers' identification with a brand, as well as its relation to consumer behavior and branding. Scholars recognize that consumer identification process has a significant impact on individual consumer behavior including: consumer buying-related decisions Ahearne et al. (2005), brand preference (Tildesley and Coote, 2009), consumer loyalty (Bhattacharya et al., 1995 and Kim et al., 2001), psychological sense of brand community and brand commitment (Casaló et al., 2008), consumer satisfaction and a higher possibility of repurchase (Kuenzel and Halliday, 2008), positive word of mouth (Del Rio et al., 2001, Kim et al., 2001 and Kuenzel and Halliday, 2008) and consumers' willingness to pay a price premium (Del Rio et al., 2001). Though prior studies offer important insights into consumer identification process and related constructs, future research could still bridge important gaps in this scholarly inquiry. Firstly, whilst much research deal with concepts that relate to consumers’ identification with a brand in the literature, there is little attempt to empirically document the factors that affect consumers' identification with a brand and to relate the concept of consumers' identification with other variables, such as brand commitment and positive word of mouth (WOM). Secondly, the branding literature mostly focuses on the concept of brand loyalty and less on the concept of brand commitment generally housed within the relationship marketing literature (e.g., Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001). Additionally, the understudied relationship between brand commitment and positive WOM (Harrison-Walker, 2001) has recently emerged as a major issue in using new media in brand promotion. An investigation of relations among the following key issues concerning the consumers' identification with a brand value congruity, consumer–brand identification, consumer–brand commitment, and positive WOM should bridge these gaps in consumer behavior and branding literature. The purpose of this study is to conduct such an investigation. This paper employs a pragmatist position and searches for methods and approaches that can best address useful research questions. This approach supports the importance of theories as mechanisms to help explain and predict phenomena and create valuable practical implications (Wicks and Freeman, 1998). As Ravasi and van Rekom (2003) report, consumer identification clearly has multidisciplinary foundations. Thus, on the theoretical side, the study advances the relations among studied concepts by integrating diverse literatures. On the practical side, this paper uses the approach similar to consumer psychology approaches such as self-brand connection and consumer–brand relationships Van Doorn et al. (2010), which should provide compelling answers about the relationships among the researched phenomena. The rest of the paper reads as follows. The next section presents an overview of the relevant literature and hypotheses. Following that is a discussion of study methodology and findings. The paper concludes with highlighting managerial implications, research limitations, and suggestions for future research.

From an academic point of view, this study contributes to growing research on consumers' relationships with a brand (Aaker, 1997, Fournier, 1998 and Thomson et al., 2005 by empirically addressing the relationships across identification and consumers' values, commitment, and positive WOM. The study empirically highlights the significance of consumers' identification as a basic psychological process that enables formation of committed and meaningful relationships with brands. Additionally, this study joins a number of articles (e.g., Brown et al., 2005 and Harrison-Walker, 2001) that focus the attention to the attitudinal loyalty, named commitment to a brand. The study strives to convert the focus of previous branding literature that mainly deals with the concept of loyalty (Casaló et al., 2008, Kressman et al., 2006 and Sirgy et al., 2007). Results of the present study emphasize the importance of differentiating between behavioral loyalty (loyalty) and attitudinal loyalty (commitment). Finally, this study stresses the importance of using the consumer commitment concept when studying high involvement processes of consumers toward brands because attitudes toward brands, not behavior habits, such as repeated purchasing, enable consumers' emotional attachment to the brand. The results of the analyses mostly support the hypothesized relationships. They illustrate that consumers do identify with their favorite brands and therefore, perceive the brand as a part of their self-concept. Specifically, the findings demonstrate that the stronger a consumer identifies with a brand, the stronger he or she tends to commit to this brand and more likely is he or she to generate positive WOM. Results also indicate the importance of a match between brand values and the values of brand's target group of consumers meaning that brands can also help satisfy self-definitional needs of an individual and that identification can be an important and relevant concept even without interpersonal connection. Similar to findings of research on identity and image congruence (Dutton et al., 1994 and Johar and Sirgy, 1991), this study shows that value congruity as well positively affects consumers’ identification and that, through identification, value congruity affects consumers’ commitment to a brand. At the theoretical level, the present research reveals value congruity as an important factor of consumer–brand identification. Previous studies have not yet extensively empirically explored and confirmed value congruity in this context. Hence, this paper supplements previous research on consumers’ identification with a brand (Kim et al., 2001 and Kuenzel and Halliday, 2008) by adding an important factor that influences identification, namely value congruity. As predicted, consumers' identification with a brand fully mediates the impact of value congruity on consumers' commitment to a brand. Contrary to the assumption, the results indicate that consumers' commitment does not mediate the impact of consumers' identification on generating positive WOM. This finding surprisingly contradicts results from Brown et al. (2005) who established a mediating role of commitment between identification and positive WOM. However, those authors argue that the mediating role of commitment is not likely one that lasts forever and is highly dependent on other factors. The cause of discrepancy between the present study and previous research (Brown et al., 2005 and Harrison-Walker, 2001) can be that unlike previous studies, this research operationalizes consumers’ commitment as a two-dimensional concept composed of affective and social compliance commitment. The results of this study show a great importance of identification that strongly influences commitment and show that consumers are willing to become great supporters of a brand if they identify with the brand. The finding that only social compliance commitment influences positive WOM shows that only when commitment focuses on the social rather than on the individual a tendency that consumers will engage in positive WOM exists. On the other hand, affective commitment is a consequence of personal interaction with a brand and relates to expressing individuality and differentiation. Therefore, when committing affectively, the brand is a reward and a means for self-confirmation. On the contrary, social compliance commitment to a brand occurs as the consequence of social interactions. Here, the communal action is one of the most obvious consequences and is manifested through consumers' tendency to generate positive WOM. This finding has important implications for the new approaches in branding that deal with the concept of customer engagement behavior (Van Doorn et al., 2010), customer-to-customer interactions related to brands (Libai et al., 2010), and the impact of new media on those interactions (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010).