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Abstract Consumer–brand relationships are witnessing a tremendous upheaval from the past few years, with emotions becoming a predictor of a brand's fate. Brand love is a construct that reflects the passionate emotional attachment of a consumer with a brand, thus, it has captured the attention of practitioners around the globe. Moreover, Gen Z consumers of countries like India have also shown huge emotional sensitivity while purchasing fashion apparel brands since these brands intensify their social image. The marketers, therefore, are looking out for strategic alternatives to engage the consumer and stimulate their emotions. In view of this, the present study adds to the existing body of literature by introducing novel linkages in branding by examining the mediating role of brand engagement in shaping loyalty intentions. The study also recognizes the moderating role of experience with several proposed relationships concerning brand love. For this purpose, cross‐sectional research was carried out by collecting responses from Gen Z consumers. The results reveal the significant mediating role of brand engagement between brand love and loyalty intention and confirms the moderating role of brand experience in two relationships (i.e., brand trust and brand image) with brand love while insignificant with brand satisfaction. It has also observed direct and indirect effects of brand love, thus, extending existing models and proposed theories. Emerging markets like India have massive potential for marketers in almost all product categories. However, the fashion apparel category has come out as an attractive industry due to the emergence of fashion‐conscious generation, that is, gen Z. The marketers today focus on the loyalty of the customer therefore, a study articulating loyalty intention and its precursors would help in constituting several branding strategies.
Joshi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.