Relationship norms, rewards and consumer-brand bonds: when cultural context and attachment anxiety matter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The consumer–brand relationship (CBR) literature is grounded in the notion that CBRs mirror interpersonal relationships. Yet little research has examined whether the relational norms that underpin these relationships operate consistently across cultural contexts. This study challenges the assumption that consumers universally value balanced and equitable relationships. It examines two contrasting national settings to explore how the norms guiding relational engagement vary across cultural contexts, focusing on differences in relational norms (communal vs exchange) and relational rewards (intrinsic vs extrinsic). Cultural dimensions such as power distance provide a useful interpretive lens for understanding these differences. Design/methodology/approach The study uses the student–university relationship as the empirical context to investigate cultural differences in CBRs. A cross-cultural survey was administered to 511 respondents in the United Kingdom and 263 respondents in Ghana. Findings The results reveal distinct relational patterns across the two cultural contexts examined. In the UK, communal and exchange-based CBRs aligned with conventional relationship theories. In Ghana, however, these patterns diverged from expected distinctions between communal and exchange norms. Furthermore, attachment anxiety interacted with cultural context, moderating the effects of relational norms and attenuating contextual differences. Originality/value This study contributes to the growing body of CBR research by introducing a cross-cultural perspective. It demonstrates that relational norms are not universally applied but vary across contrasting cultural contexts and are further shaped by individual attachment styles. These findings offer actionable insights for relationship marketing strategists, highlighting the importance of adapting approaches to both cultural and individual differences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".