Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1007/s11002-024-09752-4

Publication Title

Marketing Letters

Pages

13 pp.

Abstract

Understanding how consumers maintain their brand relationships has important implications for marketers as committed consumers contribute significant value to firms. In the present research, we propose and test one such way consumers protect their brand relationships, namely through attentional avoidance of attractive alternative partners. Across multiple studies, we find support for our theory that committed consumers avoid attending to alternative brand partners by recalling less about and spending less time focused on attractive alternatives. We further find that this inattention occurs because consumers view the competing brand as a threat to the consumer’s current relationship. In addition, we investigate a boundary condition of this effect, highlighting the importance of internally (as opposed to externally) guided (in)attention for protecting brand relationships. By identifying a novel, behavioral way consumers protect their brand relationships, we contribute to the literature on branding and brand relationships, self-threats, and reactance.

Rights

© The Authors 2024.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "All data and materials are available from the authors upon request. In addition, the data is available at OSF: "https://osf.io/5sevr/?view_only=a9bdc2d7cf9842ed80968afd654fcdc5."

ORCID

0000-0001-8832-703X (Thomas)

Original Publication Citation

Brick, D. J., & Thomas, V. L. (2024). (In)attention to attractive brand alternatives. Marketing Letters. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-024-09752-4

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