BRAND LOVE FOR CASUAL APPARELS AMONG YOUTHS IN INDONESIAN

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INTRODUCTION
We often hear people saying "I love your clothes" or "I love Starbucks very much rather than other coffee brand I know." However, there is no exact definition about love, especially when it is correlated to a specific brand. Some say that love relates to emotion. The others state that love is connected to brand attachment. In addition, somehow, loyalty is also connected to love. Therefore, some researchers try to understand the meaning of love in terms of marketing and formulate it into a theory named brand love theory.
Brand love theory becomes one of the most compelling theory in marketing field since it observe about how consumers feel attached or have possession towards certain brand, including clothes or apparels. After the trend of minimalism attracts people to do less in every aspect of their life, people tend to wear simple and casual outfit for days. Therefore, Uniqlo becomes one of the most popular brand among Indonesian youths since it provides long lasting, simple, casual, and wearable apparels. Thus, it might be said that brand love could not be separated with consumer behavior.
The publication of consumer behavior done by Belk, Russell W. (1988) is very important to the improvement of brand love. In this study, the researcher analyzed about what consumer do and why the products become important to the customers. In addition, it is stated that it is impossible to understand consumer behavior without truly understand the meaning that consumers attach to possession. Belk, Russell W. (1988) suggested that examining the ways of consumptions support the understanding of people sense of who they are. It means that sometimes consumers identify their selves to certain brands the really like. The researcher also studied the special case such as product collection.
In psychological perspective, Sternberg, R. J. (1986) presented a triangular theory of love. Based on this theory, love is categorized into three parts. The first component is intimacy which refers to closeness, connectedness, and bonded in experiencing love. The second one is called passion which the drivers are physical attraction, romance, and sexual consummation. Lastly, commitment and decision are defined as a long term to preserve the relationship and a short term decision to love. Nonetheless, none of them describe the love between individuals and brands However, the notion of triangular love theory is employed by Thomas and Jain (2022). They examined about the effect of brand love for sport clothes toward Indians using a triangular theory of love. Nevertheless, the research found that intimacy and brand passion do not have positively and significantly effect to positive word of mouth. To fill this gap, this study will use the same variable but with another type of apparel which is casual apparel, particularly Uniqlo. Shimp, T.A., & Madden, T.J. (1988) initially formulated cognitive work on love in application based on a triangular theory of love found by Sternberg, R. J. (1986). Shimp, T.A., & Madden, T.J. (1988) proved that naturally the consumer relationship towards brand is based on three factors those are fondness, missing, and decision or commitment. In this context brand is an object. Fournier, S. and Yao, J. (1997) conducted depth interview by using the insight of interpersonal connection theory to seriously study, reposition, and extend the notion of brand loyalty.

Brand Love and Casual Apparel
Additionally, Ahuvia, A.C. (1993) initiated an empirical research using theory of love to examine how consumer research touches on consumers' love of products since few researched observed about it back then. The meaning of consumers' love towards products consists of involvement, brand loyalty, materialism, favorite objects, impulsive buying, and collecting. According to Thomas and Jain (2022), brand love is all about self-concept, especially for hedonic products. It means that the products or brand which encourages the concept of self are more likely to be loved by customers. In this case, based on functional value, Uniqlo was merely a brand of clothes that human need as basic need to protect their body. On the other hand, some might select Uniqlo rather than other brands which provide casual apparels. Hence, it is quite clear that Uniqlo delivers other value that consumers might relate and use it to express their identity.
In accordance with Ahuvia, A.C. (2005), consumers have strongly emotional attachment to some love objects which one of them could be a brand. In this case, we use Uniqlo as the brand. The terminology of love is emphasized widely as anything other than an individual. For instance: books, ocean, a pet which is considered as a company, etc. Ahuvia's investigation uncovers that there are basic resemblances between interpersonal love and love in consumer terms. Accordingly, Fournier, S. (1998) studied about the brand as relationship partner. It is suggested that the brand should not be considered as a passive object of marketing exchange but as an operative, contributing component of the reciprocal relation. It is more essential to emphasize. One method to validate the brand-as-partner is to focus on ways in which brands are humanized, liven-up, or somehow personified. Pourazad, Stocchi, and Pare (2019) suggested that in theoretical perspective, the brand passion concept has been built in psychology field. Moreover, the authors defined passion in psychology as the desire for interpersonal relationship. This statement is in accordance to A Triangular Theory of Love found by Stenberg (1986) that categorize interpersonal love into three types which consist of passion, intimacy, and decision or commitment. Albert, Merunka, and Valette-Florence (2013) also found that brand passion indicates the relationship between consumers and brand whereby consumers show advance degree of desire and enthusiasm.

Brand Passion and Purchase Intention
In accordance with Carroll and Ahuvia (2006), brand love is described as the level of passionately emotive involvement a pleased buyer owns for a specific trademark. In addition, brand love consists of passion for the brand, positive evaluation of the brand, attachment to the brand, positive affects in perception to the brand, and pronouncements of love for the brand. Albert, Merunka, and Valette-Florence (2013) studied than brand passion is connected to the consumer's eagerness to generate intimate connection with the brand in order to possessing and consuming it. Based on these previous studies, this research employs a hypothesis to verify the relation between brand passion and intention to purchase. Hence, the initial hypothesis is formulated as follow. H1 : Brand passion has a direct positive impact on purchase intention.

Brand Intimacy, Purchase Intention, Positive Word-of-Mouth, and Brand Advocacy
As stated before, The Triangular Theory of Love suggested by by Sternberg, R. J. (1986) includes intimacy as one of the essential elements among three parts. Intimacy is defined as closeness, connectedness, and bonded in experiencing love. In some previous research conducted by Albert and Wesford (2009) as well as Rodrigues and Rodrigues (2019), intimacy could be replaced by affection. These researchers found that intimacy is the antecedents towards brand love. Research done by Yim et. al. (2008) revealed that passion and intimacy are strong elements that disclose love's emotional as well as motivational triggers and pledge connected to transactional exchange.
In the study of Rodrigues and Rodrigues (2019) it is shown that the influence of brand intimacy is stronger for hedonic goods in which the brands are seen as thrilling and impressive. The similar finding is found in research studied by Pang, Keh, and Peng (2009). It suggested that emotional advertising is more effective when it is applied to hedonic valued-based products. Based on these findings, Uniqlo as the popular brand among youths has possibility to be considered as hedonic goods. Although the brand says that it provides staple products, the price might not be perceived less expensive products.
Batra, R., Ahuvia, A. and Bagozzi, R.P. (2012) utilized a prototype to understand the meaning when customers say that they love specific brands. One yield of the used prototype is about self-identity. By this, it means that respondents strongly identify themselves towards the things they love. Furthermore, the respondents also denote the compliance to dissertate about the brand to other people. In other words, the display high level of word of mouth (WOM). Sweeney et al. (2020) crafted the meaning of advocacy as the highly impactful communication created with the explicit objective to influencing other parties. Accordingly, the authors suggested that advocacy as the form of proactive and ungrudging of a product or service done by costumers to influence others' view toward that product or service. This statement is supported by research from Pourazad, Stocchi, and Pare (2019) which suggested that a customer point at with a brand in the time they are truly sure about its quality and think it relevant to the other person. Therefore, based on these previous research, some hypotheses are able to be formulated as follow. H2 : Brand intimacy has a direct positive impact on purchase intention. H3 : Brand intimacy has a direct positive impact on positive WOM H4 : Brand intimacy has a direct positive impact on brand advocacy.

Social Media, Brand Loyalty, and Positive Word-of-Mouth (WOM)
In topical years, the usage of social media could not be separated to marketing activities. Thus, digital marketing has become popular among marketers and companies. When customers decide to follow a brand social media, it indicates that the costumers have knowledge about the brands as well as disclose their closeness and connectedness to certain brand whereby they tend to perform positive WOM (Thomas and Jain 2022). As an international brand originally from Japan, Uniqlo has an official social media account, both globally and in Indonesia whereby these accounts has been verified by Instagram. Besides, Uniqlo owns its official online store and application to support customers purchase the apparels virtually. In accordance with Pourazad, Stocchi, and Pare (2019), the existence of social media enables brands to be engaged directly with their customers. It also means that customers show their support and interest towards specific brands by following their social media account.
Word of mouth (WOM) is considered as either persuasive or fruitless statement from former, likelihood, or factual customers about brands or companies (Karjaluoto, Munnukka, and Kiuru 2016). Batra et. al. (2012) found that since discussing about a brand to other people is an essential part of identity development, advance level of WOM ought to be associated with brand love. In sum, costumers may become spoke person to specific brands (Albert, Merunka, and Valette-Florence 2013). Brand advocacy and brand loyalty are considered to be the significant outcomes of consumer brand identification (Rosenbaum, Ostrom, and Kuntze 2005). Fullerton (2005) suggested that attitudinal brand loyalty is often associated with brand via social media. Hence, the next hypotheses could be formulated as follow. H5 : Social media use has a direct positive impact on brand loyalty. H6 : Social media use has a direct positive impact on positive WOM

Brand Loyalty and Positive WOM
According to Spears and Singh (2004), purchase intention is defined as the individual's sensible plan to perform an attempt to buy a particular brand. In line with this statement Thomas and Jain (2022) suggested that intention refers to the decision undertaken by costumers in order to obtain a brand. Thus, the more intimately and passionately a costumer towards a brand, the higher possibility to purchase a product. Spears and Singh (2004) employed purchase intention as the consequences of attitude towards brands. Additionally, purchase intention of apparels in Indonesia has been examined and it is found that purchase intention is affected by trust and perceived value (Sumarliah, Khan, and Khan 2021). Bagozzi, Batra, and Ahuvia (2016) proved that brand love potentially be crucial to enhance the relation between customers and brands. The authors utilized measurement of willingness by combining positive WOM, favorable repurchase intention, and brand loyalty.
Positive word of mouth (WOM) refers to the extent costumers praise a specific brand rather than the other brands Pourazad, Stocchi, and Pare (2019). By this, it means that at the point costumers have intimacy towards brands, they will perform more on positive word of mouth. Thomas and Jain (2022) studied that loyal customers following brand's social media account whose more information about the brand are more likely to share their knowledge and information to their friends and peers which increases the positive WOM. Thus, the following hypotheses is formulated below. H7 : Purchase intention has a direct and positive impact on brand loyalty. : Purchase intention has a direct and positive impact on positive WOM.

Positive WOM and Brand Advocacy
According to Wang et al. (2021), WOM expressed by influencers by using their personality and popularity to explain about products has tendency to build a perspective towards related brand as well as its reputation among public. Aligned to it, Roy (2014) studied that positive WOM also influence people to mitigate the risk connected to purchase things. It is clearly expressed that those people focus more on prevention to minimize the uncertainty in decision making, including in term of purchasing.
Research conducted by Sweeney et al. (2020) described the term of advocacy as the outrageously weighty communication created with the obvious purpose of affecting people. However, the authors also mentioned that advocacy is deficient studied, especially relatively to WOM. Aligned with it, Park and MacInnis (2006) defined advocacy as the highest level of a consumer behavioral hierarchy whereby it reflects consumers' investment of their resources; such as time and money. In addition, Keller (2007) proved that advocacy is a form of WOM, but the concepts are used interchangeably. Moreover, (Roy 2014) suggested that if a firm commits as an advocate for its costumer, the costumer will reply with a higher share of wallet, trust, and loyalty. Hence, the last hypotheses is formulated below. H9 : Positive WOM has a direct impact on brand advocacy

METHOD
A questionnaire is used in this research to test the hypotheses. The brand employed in this questionnaire is Uniqlo as this brand has become famous because of its casual apparels that is mostly used for daily. Another consideration is because Uniqlo has a strong brand positioning among youth in Indonesia, thus, it is easy for respondents to relate the question about the brand. The questions are adapted from the previous research. Besides, a For the pilot test, 30 people are surveyed to check the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. The final test will be applied to 90 respondents aged 15 to 24 years who are considered as youth according to the definition written by World Health Organization (WHO). This group is selected because they are considered to have job as well as own purchasing power. The questions measure the respondents' opinion by using Likert Scale from 1 to 5 which exhibits from sturdily disagree to sincerely agree. The itemizations of the variables, question inquired, and reconcilement articles are shown in Table 1.  Sweeney et al. (2020) The questionnaire was created by utilizing Google form and it was distributed online to the targeted respondents. After the data was gathered, they were downloaded and be saved into SPSS. However, it is not able to be processed by using SPSS because of its complexity as well as there are more than one dependent variable. Therefore, all the data is run by employing Structural Equation Model (SEM) AMOS. The diagram of hypotheses in this paper is shown on the Figure 2. SEM is considered to be utilized in testing survey as it has been viewed as a coupling both of psychometric and econometric perspective that uncover the connection between latent variables in which are measured using mostly multiple observable variables. Therefore, it is quite understandable if SEM is used in examining brand love as it usually employs multiple latent variables (Gumparthi and Patra 2019).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
After running data via SEM AMOS, the result is shown in Figure 3. To test the validity using AMOS, the values of loading factor should be estimated. An indicator is valid if the value of loading factor is more than 0.5. The result of loading factor in this paper is shown in Table  2. Based on the data shown in Table 2, it is revealed that BP1, B2, and BP3 have factor loading value less than 0.5. Hence, those indicators should be put aside and data must be estimated again. The re-estimated loading factor values result is shown in Table 3. It can be seen that none of indicators have factor loading less than 0.5, thus, the next step is able to be processed. In additional, to test the reliability, it must consider construct reliability value. The data is variable if the construct reliability (CR) value is no less than 0.6. Moreover, based on the test shown in Table 4, the CR value of each construct is more than 0.6, hence, all the constructs in this study is able to be employed in this research.       From the result shown in Table 5, Table 6, and Table 3, it could be known the relationship among the variables. The result uncovers that intimacy has the highest impact directly to purchase intention and positive WOM. Additionally, positive WOM has the greatest impact directly to brand advocacy and purchase intention shows the highest impact direcly to brand loyalty. However, indirectly, intimacy generates the most impactful affect to brand advocacy and brand loyalty. From the data shown in Table 8, it is known the result of hypothesis testing. Bran passion has positive and direct impact to purchase intention, thus H1 is supported at the significant level of 10%. H2 also highly supported that brand intimacy has positive and direct impact to purchase intention at α=0.01. It is also revealed that brand intimacy has direct and positive impact as well to positive word of mouth at significant level of 5%. In accordance with H2, there has been proven that H5, H7, and H9 is strongly supported at α=0.01. On the other hand, H4, H6, and H8 are rejected.

CONCLUSION
The paper is grounded from The Triangular Theory of Love found by Sternberg, R. J. (1986). Based on this paper, it is clearly known that Brand Passion and Brand Intimacy influence significantly toward Purchase Intention. Regarded to Positive WOM, Brand Intimacy has high and significant influence to Positive WOM. In addition, the use of Social Media also performs the direct and significant effect to Positive WOM although its influence is less than Brand Intimacy. Surprisingly, Purchase Intention does not have significant and direct influence to Positive WOM. Therefore, it might be used for the future research to examine the gap shown in this result.
Furthermore, it is found that Brand Intimacy does not have direct and significant impact to Brand Advocacy. On the other hand, Positive WOM shows direct and significant influence to Brand Advocacy. In term of Brand Loyalty, it is directly and highly influenced by Purchase Intention. Nevertheless, Social Media use does not perform direct and significant effect to Brand Loyalty. Some variables used in this research do not yield direct and significant influence due several limitations. At first place, it is affected by the number of respondents employed in this study. Secondly, there is possibility to add some indicators in order to make the research more reliable in the future.