Consumer-brand relationships and social distance: A construal level theory perspective

Brands are increasingly struggling to establish and maintain strong relationships with their customers. But such relationship status is rare, and consumers are often relationship-averse or satisfied with the relationship status quo. Drawing upon construal level theory (CLT) and consumer-brand relationship (CBR) literature, this study provides empirical support for the connection between CBRs and social distance and demonstrates that changes in CBRs foster variation of consumers' preferences to primary and secondary product features, which reflects their varying construal levels and consumer-brand social distances (study 1). Furthermore, we assessed whether the congruency between consumer-brand social distance and construal levels can contribute to more favorable product evaluations. Studies 2 and 3 reveal that when consumers are socially close to brands, product attributes (low-level construal) exert a higher impact on product assessments, whereas when consumers are socially distant from the brand, price (high-level construal) exerts a greater impact on product evaluations. Additionally, unlike the common belief that high prices lead to higher perceived quality, our findings suggest that a positive perception of a product attribute for low-priced products leads to more favorable product evaluations. These results indicate that marketers can nurture existing CBRs for developing their communication strategy to achieve better consumer evaluations.