CW Park Books and Selected Publications
CW Park USC is a dedicated resource on the books, research, and scholarly contributions of marketing scholar and author Choong Whan Park.
Across his career, CW Park has contributed to the study of branding, consumer psychology, brand attachment, customer relationships, and strategic marketing. His work examines not only how consumers evaluate brands, but also how brands acquire meaning, become connected to identity, and develop lasting relationships with the people they serve.
His body of work includes co-authored books, edited scholarly volumes, research monographs, and influential journal articles. Together, these publications present a progression from strategic brand positioning to a deeper understanding of emotional attachment, brand admiration, loyalty, and long-term customer value.
This page presents a curated selection of that work rather than attempting to reproduce a complete academic bibliography.
Brand Admiration: Building a Business People Love
Brand Admiration: Building a Business People Love was co-authored by C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Andreas B. Eisingerich.
Published in 2016, the book presents an integrated approach to understanding how brands earn the trust, love, and respect of customers. It translates research in consumer psychology and marketing into a practical framework for creating brands that people value and admire.
A central idea of the book is that admired brands provide three broad forms of customer benefit:
When these benefits are delivered consistently, customers may come to trust the brand’s competence, respect what it represents, and develop positive emotional connections with it.
The book also explains why brand admiration can produce meaningful business outcomes. Admired brands may benefit from stronger loyalty, advocacy, customer commitment, and resilience when competitors introduce similar alternatives.
Rather than presenting admiration as something created through advertising alone, the book emphasizes the importance of aligning products, customer experiences, communication, organizational behavior, and long-term strategy.
Brand Admiration is especially relevant to business leaders and marketing professionals because it connects academic research with practical brand management. It provides a framework for examining how organizations create value for customers and how that value can develop into a durable relationship.
Handbook of Brand Relationships
The Handbook of Brand Relationships was edited by Deborah J. MacInnis, C. Whan Park, and Joseph R. Priester.
Published in 2009, this scholarly volume brings together research examining the psychological foundations of consumer-brand relationships.
The book considers several essential questions:
The volume is significant because it treats consumer-brand relationships as a serious field of psychological and marketing research.
Consumers do not necessarily relate to every brand in the same way. Some brands remain purely functional choices. Others become associated with identity, memories, aspirations, communities, or important stages of life.
The Handbook of Brand Relationships examines these differences and provides a broad academic foundation for understanding how brands can become meaningful to consumers.
CW Park’s role as a co-editor also reflects the collaborative nature of his scholarship. The volume combines perspectives from marketing and psychology to provide a more complete account of how brand relationships are formed, maintained, measured, and changed.
Brand Meaning Management
Brand Meaning Management was edited by Deborah J. MacInnis and C. Whan Park.
Published as part of the Review of Marketing Research series, the volume examines how brand meaning is created, communicated, interpreted, and transformed.
Brand meaning does not come from one source alone. It can develop through product experiences, advertising, cultural associations, public behavior, customer communities, celebrity relationships, design, storytelling, and the accumulated history of the brand.
Organizations can attempt to influence these associations, but consumers also interpret and reshape brand meaning through their own experiences.
This makes brand meaning management a complex strategic challenge. A company may establish a desired identity, but the meaning ultimately associated with the brand depends on whether its actions and customer experiences support that identity.
The volume explores questions such as:
The work is relevant to contemporary brand management because companies now operate in an environment where customers, media, communities, employees, and cultural events can all influence how a brand is understood.
Brand Attachment: Constructs, Consequences, and Causes
Brand Attachment: Constructs, Consequences, and Causes was written by C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Joseph R. Priester.
Published in 2008, this research monograph examines the theoretical foundations of brand attachment and its importance to consumer-brand relationships.
The work addresses three central areas.
The meaning of brand attachment
Brand attachment refers to the strength of the bond connecting a consumer with a brand. It is more specific than general awareness, familiarity, satisfaction, or positive attitude.
A consumer may like a brand without considering it personally meaningful. Attachment becomes stronger when the brand is connected to identity, important memories, valued relationships, personal goals, or everyday routines.
The consequences of attachment
Strong attachment can influence how consumers behave toward a brand.
Attached consumers may be more willing to maintain the relationship, resist alternatives, advocate for the brand, invest additional resources, or remain committed during periods of difficulty.
These outcomes make attachment relevant to both consumer psychology and long-term brand value.
The causes of attachment
The monograph also considers how attachment develops.
A brand can become more meaningful when it supports the consumer’s goals, reinforces identity, provides emotionally significant experiences, or becomes connected to important memories.
Attachment cannot be created simply by instructing consumers to care about a brand. It generally develops through accumulated experiences and personally relevant associations.
This work provides an important conceptual foundation for the later empirical research distinguishing brand attachment from other measures of consumer response.
Selected Academic Publications
CW Park’s journal articles extend across branding, consumer psychology, advertising, pricing, decision-making, and customer relationships.
The following publications are especially relevant to the principal themes of this website.
Strategic Brand Concept-Image Management
Strategic Brand Concept-Image Management was written by C. Whan Park, Bernard J. Jaworski, and Deborah J. MacInnis and published in the Journal of Marketing in 1986.
The article presents a framework for selecting, introducing, developing, and reinforcing a brand concept over time.
It distinguishes among three broad types of brand concepts:
The article argues that organizations should maintain consistency between the concept chosen for a brand and the image developed through positioning and marketing activity.
It remains an important part of CW Park’s research legacy because it connects brand meaning with long-term strategic management. It also demonstrates that his work on branding began well before the later development of brand attachment and admiration research.
The Ties That Bind
The Ties That Bind: Measuring the Strength of Consumers’ Emotional Attachments to Brands was written by Matthew Thomson, Deborah J. MacInnis, and C. Whan Park and published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2005.
The article addresses a fundamental research challenge: how to measure the strength of a consumer’s emotional attachment to a brand.
The study examines emotional attachment through feelings associated with affection, connection, and passion.
This measurement work helped researchers move beyond the general idea that consumers can feel emotionally connected to brands. It provided a structured approach for studying the strength and character of those connections.
The research also helped distinguish emotional attachment from concepts such as satisfaction and attitude. A consumer can evaluate a brand positively without experiencing the stronger emotional bond represented by attachment.
Brand Attachment and Brand Attitude Strength
Brand Attachment and Brand Attitude Strength: Conceptual and Empirical Differentiation of Two Critical Brand Equity Drivers was written by C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, Joseph R. Priester, Andreas B. Eisingerich, and Dawn Iacobucci.
The distinction is important because liking a brand does not necessarily mean that the brand is connected to a consumer’s identity or personal life.
The research develops and tests a measure based on two central dimensions:
Brand-self connection concerns the degree to which the brand is linked to the consumer’s identity. Brand prominence concerns how readily thoughts and feelings about the brand come to mind.
Together, these dimensions provide a clearer way to examine whether a brand has become personally significant.
The article remains one of the most important publications for understanding CW Park’s contribution to brand attachment research.
Attachment-Aversion Model of Customer-Brand Relationships
The Attachment-Aversion Model of Customer-Brand Relationships was written by C. Whan Park, Andreas B. Eisingerich, and Jason Whan Park and published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2013.
This research extends the study of consumer-brand relationships beyond positive attachment.
Consumers can feel close to a brand, distant from it, indifferent toward it, or actively opposed to it. The attachment-aversion framework provides a way to examine this broader range of relationships.
The work is important because negative brand relationships are not simply the opposite of positive attitudes. Aversion can involve strong psychological distance and highly accessible negative thoughts or feelings.
By examining both attachment and aversion, the model offers a more complete understanding of how consumers position brands in relation to themselves.
Brand Relationships, Emotions, and the Self
Introduction to the Special Issue: Brand Relationships, Emotions, and the Self was written by C. Whan Park and Deborah J. MacInnis and published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research in 2018.
The article considers the growing importance of understanding how consumers think about, feel about, and interact with brands.
It connects brand relationships with identity, emotional experience, attachment, aversion, loyalty, and advocacy.
This work reflects a continuing theme across CW Park’s scholarship: consumer-brand relationships are multidimensional. They cannot be understood only through purchase behavior or a simple positive-versus-negative evaluation.
The meanings consumers assign to brands can affect emotion, identity, memory, judgment, and behavior.
Connecting the Major Research Themes
The works featured on this page represent different stages in the development of modern brand research.
Strategic Brand Concept-Image Management examines how organizations select and maintain a clear brand concept.
The Ties That Bind develops a way to examine consumers’ emotional attachment to brands.
Brand Attachment: Constructs, Consequences, and Causes provides a broader theoretical account of how attachment develops and why it matters.
Brand Attachment and Brand Attitude Strength distinguishes personal attachment from favorable brand evaluation.
The Handbook of Brand Relationships places these ideas within the wider study of relationships between consumers and brands.
Brand Meaning Management examines how the associations surrounding a brand are formed and transformed.
Brand Admiration brings many of these ideas together in a practical approach to building brands that customers trust, love, and respect.
Viewed together, these works reflect a consistent progression:
Why This Scholarship Remains Relevant
Today’s consumers face extensive choice across nearly every product and service category.
Features can be copied. Prices can change. New competitors can appear quickly. Promotional messages can attract attention, but attention alone rarely creates a lasting customer relationship.
CW Park’s research helps explain why some brands remain meaningful even when consumers have access to many alternatives.
Strong relationships are more likely to develop when brands provide genuine value, support customer goals, reinforce identity, and deliver experiences that remain consistent over time.
This does not mean that every brand must create an intense emotional bond with every customer. The appropriate relationship depends on the product, the market, and the consumer’s needs.
The research does show, however, that organizations must distinguish among awareness, satisfaction, positive attitude, repeat purchasing, attachment, and admiration. These concepts describe different forms and levels of customer response.
Understanding those differences can lead to more realistic measures of loyalty and more thoughtful approaches to brand strategy.
Explore More CW Park Research
Readers can learn more about the ideas represented in these books and articles through the CW Park Research Contributions overview.
For biographical context and an introduction to his broader academic career, visit About CW Park USC.
A Lasting Body of Marketing Scholarship
CW Park USC presents a curated introduction to the books and selected publications of Choong Whan Park, whose research has helped advance modern understanding of brand strategy, consumer psychology, brand attachment, admiration, loyalty, and long-term customer relationships.
From early work on brand concept management to later studies of attachment, aversion, and admiration, CW Park’s publications provide a connected body of scholarship examining how brands acquire meaning and become important to consumers.
These contributions continue to offer valuable insights for researchers, students, marketing professionals, and organizations seeking to understand how enduring brands and customer relationships are created.