[1] Nearly 25 years later, there now exists a robust and varied scholarly sub-discipline on brand relationships, with contributions from a range of theoretical disciplines including social and cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology, culture studies, and economics, and methods from empirical modeling to experiments, ethnography, and depth interviewing.
Fetscherin and Heinrich in 2014[3] conducted an extensive literature review on this topic and analyzed 392 papers by 685 authors in 101 journals.
They concluded brand relationships are notably interdisciplinary with publications in many different fields such as applied psychology, communication as well as business management and marketing.
Their website states that "to promote this field, advance knowledge, facilitate the exchange of information, and encourage collaboration".
Fajer and Schouten (1995) present the Typology of Loyalty-Ordered Person-Brand Relationships as summarized below in the table.
Aggarwal provides a theory that distinguishes these two basic brand relationship types according to the exchange norms that operate within them.
Hyun Kyung Kim, Moonkyu Lee, and Yoon Won Lee (2005) in their paper Developing a Scale For Measuring Brand Relationship Quality present the following dimensions to measure brand relationship quality.
[16] The goal of brand intimacy is to create long-term purchasing relationships between consumers and particular companies.
[28] This would explain why some strong positive brand relationships can readily turn into hateful, antagonistic associations.
[28] There are many different concepts and facets studied and related to consumers' relationships to brands (e.g., love styles).