Identifying consumers’ emotional attachment to brands using real-time experience tracking

Abstract

The study aims to identify any links that might exist between consumers’ emotional attachment and customer involvement. The main emphasis of this study is to investigate whether commitment varies from the moment an individual identifies the need to purchase a mobile phone to a later stage in their decision-making process. The nature of this work is longitudinal and aims to widen the understanding of different encounters with different mobile phone brands and if these affect any changes in the consumers’ attitudes and behaviour. Although many researchers usually depend on traditional methods to examine consumers’ behaviour, this work involves the utilisation of real-time experience tracking. Through a smartphone application, approximatley forty-one individuals with the intention of purchasing a new mobile phone were required to report all encounters which were experienced with different mobile phone brands over a period of one week. This approach did not only enable the gathering of data throughout the consumers’ decision-making process but also gained a deeper explanation of the participants’ reflections about their encounters. The utilisation of real-time experience tracking enables the use of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Although the use of real-time experience tracking concerning consumer behaviour is the first of its kind in Malta, this study suffers from a limited sample. The analysis of the quantitative data gathered did not provide the precise answer to the research question being investigated and to the validity of the hypotheses proposed. However, it still offers some indications of consumers’ behaviour throughout their purchase process. The findings from this study indicate that there was no statistically significant difference in consumers’ attachment across time. Moreover, existing patterns across encounter types are observed in this study. Contrastingly, the gathered qualitative information identifies the regularities and underlying mechanisms in consumers’ behaviour. Two main themes were outlined in participants’ reflections: brand and price, showing that these two factors are extremely important for customers when deciding which mobile phone brand to buy.