Purpose – This paper determines one explanation for how the self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty through the brand experience. Brand experience should verify the self-brand connection by acting as a mechanism through which a self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from 317 adults through paid Facebook Boosting of an online survey, and analyzed using structural equation modelling.
Findings – Analyses confirm that brand experience fully mediates the association between selfbrand connection and brand loyalty.
Research limitations / implications – Ensuring a positive brand experience is critical for brand managers opting to maintain consumers’ self-brand connections and brand loyalty. Causality suffered owing to the cross-sectional design of the study.
Practical implications – Self-brand connection is viewed as consumer-driven. However, by identifying the brand experience to verify the self-brand connection and as a factor that mediates the self-brand connection-loyalty relationship of consumers, brand experience is recognized as a new factor which brand managers can control to manage self-brand connections and brand loyalty.
Originality / value – This paper is the first to apply self-verification theory to the self-brand connection-loyalty relationship by explicating brand experience as a mediator of this relationship. This paper argues self-verification is not context specific and lived experiences with the brand, irrespective of context, establish consumer-brand relationships. This paper confirms the secondorder factor structure of the brand experience scale (Brakus et al., 2009) as a mediator in this selfbrand connection-loyalty model.
