Store love in single brand retailing: the roles of relevant moderators

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how various retail store atmospheric cues can impact store brand loyalty (SBL) via eliciting store brand love. This paper posits that different store brand experiential cues can predict brand love only when the experience is processed based on perceiving the brand as human-like entity, i.e. brand anthropomorphization. Brand love cannot be strongly elicited without the sense of brand anthropomorphization. Moreover, brand love can impact brand loyalty intention only under the moderating condition of perceived firm’s positive relationship marketing orientation. Design/methodology/approach Survey was conducted among urban shopping mall consumers, and the data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Findings The findings support that store brand experience elicited by store environmental cues can better predict store brand love when the store is perceived as human, and store brand love can better predict conative SBL when consumer perceives that the store is having a positive relationship orientation. Originality/value The value of the paper lies in empirically testing the psychological mechanism through which store atmospheric cues lead to SBL.