Antecedents and consequences of brand passion among young smartphone consumers: evidence of Iran

As emotional consumer-brand relationships have a high impact on consumer behavior, brand managers tend to create passionate brands, e.g. by using emotional advertising messages. Although the role of emotions is frequently discussed in marketing literature, the causalities of brand passion are rudimentarily analyzed in empirical research. The aim of this study is investigating the antecedents (affective brand experience, brand prestige, brand identification and, brand trust) and consequences (positive word of mouth and willingness to pay price premium) passion to Smartphone brands among young consumers. The research model was tested using data convenient sampling collected from students of Azad University in Tehran City. The numbers of valid observations were 384. Structure equation modeling using Lisrel 8.80 software was used to verify and validate the research model. The results revealed that affective brand experience, brand identification, and brand trust (as important antecedents) has a positive and significant impact on brand passion. In addition, brand prestige has not a positive impact on brand passion. Finally, brand passion has a positive and significant impact on positive word of mouth and willingness to pay a higher price for the brand.