Exploring Obsession Towards Brands

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the investigation of ‘brand obsession’, defined as a consumer relationship phenomenon that involves 1) non-deliberate, intrusive, and repetitive thoughts about the brand that 2) lead to compulsive behavioural intentions aiming at reducing these thoughts. The study of brand obsession extends existing understanding of consumer-brand relationships by introducing brand obsession as a conceptually novel concept. It enables researchers to discern, explain, and measure a critical facet of consumer-brand relationships that can predict important consumer behaviours, such as compulsive buying. For example, it can shed light on the cognitive and motivational states that give rise to engaging in compulsive behaviour, which has largely been neglected by existing studies on compulsive buying as it has extensively investigated the phenomenology of the compulsive act itself (as opposed to the cognitive and conative states that precede it). The study of brand obsessions therefore has important implications for researchers, brand managers, policy makers, and even consumers.