Susan Fournier is Associate Professor and Dean's Research Fellow at Boston University, USA. Her research explores the creation and capture of value through branding and brand relationships and she has received five awards for her published work. She is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing amongst others

Foreword Introduction: The Why, How, and So What of Consumers' Relationships with Their Brands Part I: The "What" of Brand Relationships: Exploring Brand Relationship Varieties and Type 1. When is our Connection to Brands like our Connection to People?: Differentiating between Consumer-Brand Relationships and Interpersonal Relationships 2. Exploring Relationship Analogues in the Brand Space 3. Understanding Negative Consumer Responses: Motivations for the Brand Avoidance Relationship 4. Brand Flings: When Great Brand Relationships Are Not Made to Last 5. Examining Childhood Consumption Relationships 6. Mental Accounting in Consumer-Brand Relationships Part II: Understanding Consumer-Brand Relationship Bonds: Brand Love and Other Strength Indicators 7. Love Actually?: Measuring and Exploring Consumers' Brand Love 8. Brand Love: Interpersonal or Parasocial Love Relationships? 9. Brand Relationship Quality - Conceptualization and Measurement: Results of a Cross-Industry Study in the German Consumer Market 10. Brand Forgiveness: How Close Brand Relationships Influence Forgiveness 11. Relationships Are Complicated: On Construct Validity when Consumer-Brand Relationships are Systems Part III: How Goals and Identity Drive Consumers' Relationships with their Brands 12. This Store Just Gets Me!: Customer Chemistry and its Role in Identity Construction 13. Beyond Relationship: Metaphor Transfer and Beyond 14. Teenagers' Purposive Brand Relationships: From Social Filters to Shoulders to Lean On 15. Brands Can Be like Friends: Goals and Interpersonal Motives Influence Attitudes toward Preferred Brands Part IV: Managerial Applications and Extensions of Consumer-Brand Relationship Ideas 16. Firing Your Best Customers 17. On the Complexity of Managing Brands in a Social Media World 18. Corporate Identity and its Reflective Effect in Developing Brand Relationships 19. Brand Humanity: Transforming the Business of Building Brands Final Reflections: So Where Do We Go from Here?

The creation and management of customer relationships is fundamental to the practice of marketing and marketers have long maintained a keen interest in these relationships. The aim of this book is to advance knowledge about consumer-brand relationships by disseminating new research that may inform theory and company best practices.