Love is in the … Rare? Investigating Brand Love Prevalence and its Link With Behavioural Loyalty Across Multiple Product Categories

Brand love is a widely researched marketing concept, yet its prevalence across different high involvement product categories is relatively unexplored. The absence of clear empirical guidelines concerning the prevalence of brand love undermines the ability, for both researchers and marketers, to turn evaluations of brand love into meaningful conclusions for brand-building efforts. To address this issue, this study replicates and extends prior research by investigating how common brand love is across high- and low-involvement product categories, and its relationship with purchase intentions and behavioural loyalty, measured via Share of Category Requirements (SCR). The analysis of survey data from 1,554 US consumers for four product categories (cars, running shoes, retail banking, and beer) suggests that four in ten category users loved at least one brand within each category. Yet, brand-level love is more uncommon, ranging between 3.5% to 15%, on average, across the product categories tested. Brand love was higher in transformational high-involvement categories (cars, running shoes) than in informational ones, but high-involvement categories alone did not exhibit more love compared to low-involvement ones. Additionally, although brand love correlates with higher purchase intentions, the link with behavioural loyalty appeared rather weak across all categories. These results challenge assumptions about brand love’s scalability and strategic value of brand love, offering empirically grounded benchmarks for marketing researchers and practitioners.