1. Introduction
Happiness is a common pursuit of value for all human beings, and people strive for happiness in a variety of ways. Some people seek happiness through their work, and others seek happiness through relationships with family members or friends. Others find happiness through leisure time alone. In this regard, prior studies have attempted to reveal how to increase happiness. For example, the Sustainable Happiness Model [
1] suggests that it is effective to express the ideal-self as one of the ways to continuously raise and maintain a sense of happiness.
Improving the happiness of consumers has also drawn much attention from business researchers. Kotler et al. [
2] argues that a company’s marketing activities should move in the direction of moving people’s hearts and improving the quality of life. As a good example of these efforts, Nike, through Michael Jordan, has made it possible for consumers to express their imagination beyond their limits for what they want. Therefore, building on the Sustainable Happiness Model, we expect that a company’s marketing efforts can positively influence consumer happiness by reflecting consumers’ ideal self-concepts through brands. Specifically, we expect that congruency between ideal self-image and brand image is likely to influence brand identification, which in turn enhances a sense of happiness through positive emotions. In this regard, a main objective of this study is to reveal the mechanism of how the congruency of the consumers’ ideal self-concepts and the brand image enhances consumer happiness through brand identification and positive emotions.
Revealing how to enhance the well-being of consumers through business practices is significant, as extant literature has identified enhancing customer well-being as helping firms to achieve higher financial performance in the long-term [
3,
4,
5,
6]. In this regard, we believe that our findings provide useful insights for business practitioners to increase the sustainability of their business.
2. Theoretical Background and Hypotheses
The Sustainable Happiness Model posits that a person’s chronic happiness level can be increased and then sustained [
1,
7]. Specifically, the Sustainable Happiness Model proposes that visualizing the ideal self-concept is one of the effective ways to enhance a sense of happiness. Self-concept refers to the cognitive and affective understanding of who and what we are [
8,
9,
10]. As a person’s self-concept is important, it has been studied from a multidimensional point of view in psychology as well as in business research. Sirgy [
10] suggests multiple dimensions of self-concept, which are actual self, social self, ideal self, and ideal social self. In the business studies, self-congruency, which refers to a fit between the consumer’s self and the brand’s image, has drawn much attention because extant studies show that the self-congruency can enhance brand performances in many ways [
10,
11,
12,
13]. By applying the Sustainable Happiness Model to the business context, we expect that ideal self-congruency, a fit between the consumer’s ideal self-concepts (ideal self and ideal social self) and brand image, is likely to help increase the feeling of happiness.
As previous studies suggest, consumers tend to connect their self-concepts with a brand image and thus identify themselves with the brand that is congruent with their self-concepts [
11,
13]. That is, it is a common way for consumers to express themselves through the brands they use. For example, some wealthy consumers use luxury brands such as Channel to express their social and economic status.
We expect that the ideal self/ideal social self-congruency is likely to enhance consumers’ identification with the brand. Brand identification is defined as people perceiving and defining themselves according to the attributes of the brand [
14]. In other words, brand identification is the perception of sameness between the brand and consumer [
15]. For instance, Kim et al. [
16] found that people are more likely to feel brand identification as the brand expresses their self-concepts. In line with this, Stokburger-Sauer et al. [
17] also suggests that brand-self similarity is a determinant of brand identification.
While actual self-congruency and ideal self-congruency are both important, some studies compare the differential impacts of them on consumers. Of the multidimensional self-concepts, Wetzel and Insko [
18] and Herbst [
19] suggest that reflecting ideal self-concept is a stronger predictor for brand identification than reflecting the actual self-concept. That is, people can be more attractive to brands reflecting their ideal self than actual self. LaPrelle et al. [
20] also shows that people try to have a stronger relationship with a person who shows their ideal self than a person who shows their actual self. Based on the argument, we propose the following hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1. Congruency between ideal self and brand image will be positively associated with brand identification.
Hypothesis 2. Congruency between ideal social self and brand image will be positively associated with brand identification.
The self-expansion theory posits that people have an innate need to incorporate others into their self-concepts [
21]. Based on previous studies in branding, we expect that building relationships with brands, like brand identification, is likely to fulfill the innate needs of self-expansion for consumers. Fournier [
22] suggests that a relationship between a consumer and a brand is very similar to a relationship with other people. Even though the relationship between the consumer and the brand is not interpersonal, brands can play the role of the “other”, with whom the consumer identifies [
22] (p. 346). It is because consumers tend to build powerful relationships with brands when the brands express their identities [
23].
Thus, we expect that brand identification, which can fulfill the needs of self-expansion through the relationship with brands, is likely to evoke positive emotions for consumers. Prior studies support this view. For example, Patrick et al. [
24] examines the relationship between need fulfillment and well-being. They find that need fulfillment was associated with more positive emotions and less negative emotions. Branscombe and Wann [
25] also find that a strong sense of unity with their favorite sports team can eliminate depressed emotions and alienation, which results in the increasing of self-worth. Based on the argument, we propose the following hypothesis.
Hypothesis 3. Brand identification will be positively associated with positive emotions.
Emotions are composed of various reaction tendencies [
26]. A high level of positive emotion is a positive energy, a strong concentration, and a positive attitude to the task at hand, while a low level of positive emotion is negative for sadness, lethargy, bitterness, and immediate situation [
27]. Positive emotions also increase brain dopamine [
28]. Positive emotions broaden attention and cognition [
29], which facilitates coping with stress and adversity [
30]. In addition, positive emotions increase the likelihood of finding positive meaning in both ordinary events and adversity [
31,
32]. The relationship between positive emotions and positive meaning is reciprocal because positive meaning also triggers positive emotions [
32].
Based on this, Fredrickson [
32] proposes the broaden-and-build model of positive emotions. According to the broaden-and-build theory model, positive emotions broaden new ideas and activities, and promote personal wealth, such as social support and spirited passion. The enhancement and strengthening of these psychological resources have a positive impact on physical and mental health [
32,
33]. In line with this, those who experience high levels of positive emotions experience less mental and psychological difficulty or suffering [
34].
Happiness can be defined as consisting of three components: Frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and a high level of life satisfaction [
35]. Considering the nature of happiness, we expect that positive emotions are likely to enhance a sense of happiness by helping people feel more positive emotions and less negative emotions. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed
Hypothesis 4. Positive emotions will be positively associated with happiness.
Figure 1 shows our proposed conceptual model of this study, which portrays the influence of congruency between ideal self-concepts and brand image on consumer happiness through brand identification and positive emotions.
5. Discussion
In this study, we examine how congruency between ideal self-concepts (ideal self-image and ideal social self-image) and brand image positively influences happiness by applying the Sustainable Happiness Model. As expected, we found that when ideal self-image and ideal social self-image are congruent with brand image, a sense of happiness can be enhanced through brand identification and positive emotions.
The findings of this study can provide useful and noble insights by showing that the Sustainable Happiness Model can be applied to brand research. That is, a consumer can feel enhanced happiness through a brand that is congruent with his/her ideal self or ideal social self. We believe that this study can contribute to the literature by revealing the mechanism of how congruency between ideal self-image and brand image positively affect happiness. In addition, the results of further two-mediation analysis provide strong support for our proposed conceptual model and underlying psychological mechanism of how ideal self-brand congruency ultimately increases consumer happiness. That is, congruency between ideal self-concepts and brand image does not directly increase happiness, but only through brand identification and positive emotions. No prior study, to the best of our knowledge, has aimed to find out the mediating process between ideal self/ideal social self-brand congruency and consumer happiness by applying the Sustainable Happiness Model.
We believe that our proposed conceptual model, based on the Sustainable Happiness Model in this study, is linked to ‘enriching benefits’ from the theory of brand’s 3E benefits. The theory posits that there are three types of benefits (enabling, enticing, and enriching benefits) that a brand has for consumers [
45]. According to the theory, strong enriching benefits of a brand enriches consumers by resonating with their sense of self (who they are, who they were, and who they want to be). As this is consistent with congruency between ideal self-concepts and brand image in our conceptual model in a sense, we may be able to expect the possibility that the Sustainable Happiness Model can be applied to the theory of brand’s 3E benefit and thus further explore the enriching benefits of a brand for consumer well-being.
Enhancing consumer happiness is also closely related to the long-term sustainability of a business. This means that our findings can also provide important managerial implications for business practitioners. A company’s marketing efforts have been criticized for unnecessary and provocative advertising and pushing consumers to spend more money. The criticism calls for heightened social responsibility of marketing practices [
6]. In this regard, our findings are able to suggest new directions for the marketing strategy of a company. A company can practice effective marketing strategy and positively influence consumers’ happiness at the same time by reflecting consumers’ ideal self-concepts in the process of developing brand image. In addition, extant studies indicate that enhancing customer well-being can help firms achieve higher financial performance in the long-term [
3,
4,
5]. For example, Lee and Sirgy [
6] suggest the concept of quality-of-life (QOL) marketing. QOL marketing is defined as marketing practice designed to enhance customer well-being while preserving the well-being of other stakeholders [
46,
47]. The concept of QOL marketing has been discussed in a variety of contexts to improve the long-term sustainability of businesses [
6]. In this light, as a previous study also suggests [
48], we believe that our findings can also make managerial contributions by suggesting one of the effective ways of how to enhance customer well-being through branding strategy.
While this study made contributions, it has some limitations that further research should address. First, we propose our conceptual model of how congruency between ideal self-concepts and brand image enhances consumer happiness through psychological mechanisms of brand identification and positive emotions. However, it is possible that other psychological mechanisms also exist between ideal self/ideal social self-brand congruency and consumer happiness. Further studies may need to find out the other potential psychological mechanisms and to more deeply understand the relationship between ideal self/ideal social self-brand congruency and consumer happiness. Second, since we apply the Sustainable Happiness Model, which argues the role of presenting ideal self-concepts on enhancing happiness, we focus on the positive effect of ideal self/ideal social self-brand congruency on happiness. However, according to self-discrepancy theory [
49], the gap between actual self and ideal self can generate negative feelings. If the ideal self is excessively presented, there is a possibility that the gap between the actual self and the ideal self becomes large, which leads to a negative result. This may decrease the sense of happiness. Thus, it would be interesting to simultaneously examine the positive and negative effect of presenting ideal self on happiness in further studies. In addition, since respondents who participated in our study are all Asian, it would be worthwhile if further studies examined cultural differences on the effect of presenting ideal self on happiness for a deeper understanding.