“…Individuals try to keep a positive social identity by associating with a prestigious company (Ahearne et al, 2005) since such association delivers them social opportunities (Brown, 1969) and reinforces social prestige (Ashforth & Mael, 1989;Cheney, 1983). Overall, support has been found for relationships between the prestige and attractiveness of organizations and identification in a number of contexts, including employee-company identification (Smidts, Pruyn, & Van Riel, 2001), customercompany identification (Ahearne et al, 2005;Currás-Pérez, Bigné-Alcañiz, & Alvarado-Herrera, 2009), and customer-brand identification (Elbedweihy, Jayawardhena, Elsharnouby, & Elsharnouby, 2016;Kuenzel & Vaux Halliday, 2008;Stokburger-Sauer, Ratneshwar, & Sen, 2012). When a customer sees the external image of a brand as distinctive and prestigious, the customer's identification with that brand strengthens.…”