Date of Award

Fall 12-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program/Concentration

Business Administration - Marketing

Committee Director

Yuping Liu-Thompkins

Committee Member

Kiran Karande

Committee Member

Veronica L. Thomas

Committee Member

Sheila K. Keener

Abstract

Customer loyalty is vital for business success, yet most research treats loyal customers as a uniform group. This essay challenges that assumption by proposing that attitudinally loyal customers are psychologically heterogeneous. Drawing on Construal Level Theory (CLT), I introduce the construct of Consumer-Brand Construal Level (CBCL) to distinguish loyal customers based on how abstractly or concretely they construe their brand relationships. I conceptualize two loyalty mindsets, macro-loyalty (abstract, big-picture) and micro-loyalty (concrete, detail-focused), and argue that even highly loyal consumers differ meaningfully in their CBCL. I develop and validate a new CBCL scale (Studies 1–2) and then test how these mindsets predict key loyalty outcomes across five additional studies. Findings show that macro-loyal consumers display deeper loyalty and greater resistance to switching, consistent with predictions. However, for willingness to pay a premium, responses to brand transgressions, and reactions to cross-selling vs. upselling, extremely loyal consumers often showed patterns opposite to expectations. When loyalty reached very high levels, a macro mindset no longer produced the anticipated benefits and sometimes reversed direction. These results identify boundary conditions of loyalty segmentation and suggest that extreme loyalty may involve distinct psychological processes. Overall, the research offers a more nuanced view of loyalty and provides theoretical and managerial implications for tailoring strategies to different loyal customer mindsets.

The second essay explores an understudied emotional driver of consumer–brand relationships: boredom. Boredom is a common yet understudied emotion in consumer research, particularly in relation to its role in shaping consumer–brand relationships. Drawing on meaning-regulation theories, this research proposes that boredom, especially the type characterized by a perceived lack of meaning, can orient consumers toward brands as potential sources of psychological restoration. I theorize that consumers experiencing meaning-deficit boredom are motivated to seek psychological restoration by turning to brands they perceive as meaningful. Specifically, I test the hypotheses that boredom increases brand loyalty (Studies 1), that this effect is mediated by consumers’ motivation to search for meaning (Studies 2a and 2b), and that boredom proneness predicts greater loyalty propensity through chronic meaning-seeking (Study 3). I also investigate whether bored consumers respond more positively to meaningful brand messages (Study 4), whether engaging with a loyal brand can reduce state boredom (Study 5), and whether brand-specific attachment avoidance moderates the effect of boredom on brand loyalty (Study 6). Empirically, the findings provide mixed but theoretically informative evidence. Experimental manipulations of state boredom did not consistently produce the predicted increases in loyalty, and some effects emerged in the opposite direction. However, study 3 offers clear support for the proposed mechanism, showing that boredom proneness predicts higher loyalty propensity indirectly via chronic search for meaning, and several supplementary patterns, such that loyal-brand engagement can buffer against boredom, converge with the theorizing. This research introduces boredom as a novel, if bounded, antecedent of loyalty and positions brand loyalty as a potential psychological coping mechanism that can help consumers regulate meaning, while also clarifying important boundary conditions for when such effects are likely to emerge.

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DOI

10.25777/j6ga-ea05

ISBN

9798276040165

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