We investigated the impact of consistency between consumer personality and brand personality on emotional brand attachment. Participants were 200 undergraduate students at Tsinghua University and we used leading brands in the product category of mobile phone as the survey's stimuli. The results of a structural equation model suggested that consistency in the personality dimensions of sincere, cool, and young had a significant positive impact on the participants' brand attachment compared with consistency in the dimensions of simple, sensitive, reliable, and competent. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that people feel emotionally attached to brands that match their personality or reflect who they believe they are. We also discuss important theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Consumers often use spatial metaphors to describe time. Through six studies, the present research demonstrates that time metaphors influence consumers' perceptions of the temporal distance to future events. Specifically, an ego‐moving metaphor, which characterizes the movement of the self across a timeline from present to future, leads consumers to perceive a target event as more temporally distant than a time‐moving metaphor that illustrates the movement of the event from future to present. This time metaphor distance effect arises because the ego‐moving (vs. time‐moving) metaphor hinders psychological arousal and thus makes the events seem more temporally distant. We also demonstrate a downstream consequence of this effect: by lengthening the perceived temporal distance, the ego‐moving (vs. time‐moving) metaphor leads to greater consumer impatience in a waiting context.

No abstract