وفاداری برند : ارتباط سلف برند و تجربه نام تجاری Brand loyalty: Exploring self-brand connection and brand experience

Introduction Mahatma Gandhi acknowledged the relevance of self-verification theory in saying, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony”. As consumers we strive for such consistency in our views of ourselves, that is, our self-concept. Brands which have been incorporated into our self-concept require that our resulting behavior and experiences must align with the self-concept to minimize psychological discomfort. Such self-verification provides a sense of prediction and control over the social environment, and is therefore important for establishing an accurate and reliable self-concept (Swann and Read, 1981). Consumers have an innate drive to define and express themselves through the purchases they make. Based on McCracken’s (1989) theory of meaning, meaning is transferred from the culturally constituted world to brands and then onto consumers. Seminal work has indicated that consumers direct their behavior to maintain or enhance their self-concept (Grubb and Grathwohl, 1967), where self-concept refers to the way consumers think and feel about who, and what, they perceive themselves to be (Rosenberg, 1981). Consumers’ self-concept can be linked to a brand, resulting in self-brand connections (Escalas and Bettman, 2003). These self-brand connections are very subjective, consumer-driven personal relationships. Self-brand connection is defined as the degree to which consumers incorporate the brand into their self-concepts (Escalas and Bettman, 2003), which results in varied intensity levels of consumerbrand relationships (Fournier, 1998). For example, a consumer with a strong self-brand connection to Apple may view himself as thinking differently, linking his behavior and self-concept to Apple’s slogan, and may feel like an innovator, linking his status to Apple’s as an innovation leader. He therefore adopts Apple as a way to create, portray and express these characteristics of the selfconcept through consumption of the brand. So, consumers may describe the brand experience associated with brands through relationships (Schmitt et al., 2015), thus demonstrating the association between self-brand connection and brand experience, although previously unexplored. Brakus et al. (2009:53) define brand experience “as subjective, internal consumer responses (sensations, feelings and cognitions) and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity,