Consumer Brand Relationships Research: A Bibliometric Citation Meta-Analysis

Abstract

This study examines how scholarly research on consumer brand relationships has evolved over the last decades by conducting a bibliometric citation meta-analysis. The bibliography was compiled using the ISI Web of Science database. The literature review includes 392 papers by 685 authors in 101 journals. The area of consumer brand relationships research is notably interdisciplinary, with articles mainly published in journals for business and management, but also applied psychology and communication. We show the impact of universities, authors, journals, and key articles and outline possible future research avenues. The study explores seven sub-research streams and visualizes how articles on consumer brand relationships build on each other using co-citation mapping technique. Based on the results of this analysis we propose an agenda for future research that offers the potential to advance research on the relationships between consumers and brands