A Model for Consumer Devotion: Affective Commitment with Proactive Sustaining Behaviors

Ronald Pimentel, Department of Management and Marketing, California State University, Bakersfield, 9001 Stockdale Highway, 20 BDC Bakersfield, CA 93311-1099 Email: rpimentel3@csub.edu Phone: 661-665-6816 Fax: 661-664-2438 Kristy Reynolds, Department of Marketing, E J Ourso community of Business Administration, 3127 CEBA Building, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA 70803-6314 Email: reynolds@lsu.edu Phone: 225-578-7296 Fax: 225-578-8616

McCracken (1986) has explained by what means "consumer goods have a significance that goe beyond their utilitarian character and commercial value." This significance is ofttimes applied, not only to the tangible advantageouss but to the brand. Consumer involvement with brands finds expression in a number of forms: self-extensions (Belk 1988) person-brand relationships (Fournier 1998) self-brand connections (Escalas and Bettman 2003) and consumer-company identification (Bhattacharya and Sen 2003) In this paper, we are particularly pertain toed with situations where consumer connections with brands have reached a horizontal of loyalty so intense that the loyalty survives poor outcome performance, scandal, bad publicity, high prices, and absence of promotional efforts. It is loyalty that is press outed when consumers will go to their hold expense to provide exposure for the brand name and trademark upon T-shirts, baseball caps, and brimmed goblet stickers. Clearly, achieving such horizontals of consumer loyalty can be a tremendous asset for a brand, and consequently it is a matter worthy of investigation. We consign to this phenomenon as "consumer devotion."

Consumer DevotionWe lay opened the concept of consumer devotion as a possible extension to brand equity, on the other hand based on the consumers rather than the brands. Brand equity is defined as the "set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and representative that add to or subtract from the value provided by means of a product or service to a firm and/or to that firm's customers," (Aaker 1991 p 15) Brand loyalty is an important asset contributing to a brand's equity. Aaker (1991) describes five horizontals of brand loyalty. The highest of these is the "committed buyer" Within the category of "committed buyers" the "ultimate committed customer" is described as "the Harley-Davidson rider who wears the Harley sign as a tattoo (Aaker 1991 p 41)" We assert that the "ultimate committed customer" is a "devoted" consumer as described in our model

The devot consumer derives benefits from the brand that are affective in nature, rather than barely utilitarian. In a postmodern consumer society characterized by dint of secularization of religion and sacralization of the secular, consumer brands may take upon aspects of the "sacred" (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989) for their devot followers. A marker of this status is when the logo of the brand has become symbolic, not alone of the brand, but also of consumer of the brand. The devot consumer will display the brand logo upon items from product categories different from that of the branded crops such as the logo of an automobile company upon a T-shirt. They will look for opportunities to acquire and exhibit the logo--not necessarily in connection with consuming the production In addition, commitment to the brand is essentially permanent for the devot consumer

Consumer devotion can be compared to a homage following (Carr 1996). Harley Davidson is ofttimes mentioned in discussions of brands that have gained intense consumer loyalty. The television present to views The X-Files and Star Trek have gained similar loyalty from their fans. These brands are enjoying increasingly broad appeal, on the other hand their appeal is that of niche or worship brands. In our investigation we sought similar attitudes and behaviors toward more mainstream consumer brands. We ground some of the same behaviors in regard to brands like as Saturn, Levi's, Nike, and Coca-Cola. Each of these brands, however, has newly suffered declining loyalty (Welch 2000; Munk 1999a; Munk 1999b; Neuborne and Kerwin 1999; venders 1998; Tedeschi 1998a; Tedeschi 1998b; McKay and Deogun 1999)

In the course of our research we discovered that the attitudes, affect, and behaviors that interested us were displayed readily by the agency of fans of sports teams, particularly community football teams. Consequently, we unfolded a model of consumer devotion based upon such fans, and then applied it to other consumer outcomes and services. In our archetype we propose that consumer devotion appears when there is internalized affective commitment (Echambadi 2000) accompanied by the agency of proactive sustaining behaviors.

The boundary "devotion" implies religious fervor, and indeed, a association football team (or other external reality of devotion) holds elements of the "sacred" for the devot fan. Informants many times referred to their fandom as religion, and used religious confines such as "conversion" and "saint" when discussing it. Drawing from Durkheim, Eliade, and others, Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry (1989) disentangleed a list of 12 properties of sacredness: hierophany, kratophany, opposition to the profane, contamination, sacrifice, commitment, objectification, ritual, myth, mystery, communitas, and ecstasy and pour Many of these apply for devot fans and their adored teams. The quality of commitment is central for devot fans of corporation football teams. We saw this principle manifest by dint of the fans who own recreational vehicles that they use to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the teams to away games--all of them in a certain number of cases. Many informants are committed enough to attend all of the abiding-place games and watch all of the televised games. individual of them advanced the date of his wedding with equal reason that it would not conflict with the Alabama football schedule.