About

Aaron Ahuvia is an award-winning educator and researcher who explores consumers’ involvement with products and services that they love, as well as the nature of contemporary consumer culture with a special focus on how people can build successful lives within this environment. He is a widely published author and has held significant roles such as the former Vice President for Academic Affairs for the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQUOLS) and former associate editor for the Journal of Economic Psychology. Ahuvia has worked or taught internationally in countries including Italy, Finland, Denmark, Israel, Jordan, Yemen, Singapore, Rwanda, and Kazakhstan, and has been awarded the first US government grant project in Libya since the lifting of sanctions. His teaching and scholarship have been recognized at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he received the 2007 Distinguished Research Award and was named the 2001 Faculty Member of the Year.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Marketing
• Business
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Advertising
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• The role of brands in society

  Décisions Marketing · 2026-01-23

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Reimagining Human-AI Relationships: A Positive Future for Chatbots, Social AI, and the Phygital Self

  Journal of Macromarketing · 2025-12-08 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  There are many valid concerns about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that must be taken seriously. However, historically, technological progress has sometimes led to unexpected benefits. This essay begins with an imaginative fictional future-history, followed by an academic discussion. The fictional narrative acts as a jumping-off point for exploring the potential benefits of social AI, or AI that interact socially with humans, (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Grok etc) in three areas: (1) social AI agents as relationship partners, (2) how our interactions with AI might affect our human relationships, and (3) social AI's influence on shaping self-identity. Consistent with macromarketing, we examine how social AI in marketing might affect people's lives far beyond the economic sphere. And in keeping with the theme of this special issue on phygital marketing, we conclude with suggestions on how these dynamics could impact phygital (physical and digital) marketing strategies and consumption trends.

  PublisherDOI

• La place des marques dans la société

  Décisions Marketing · 2025-11-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Le but de cette recherche exploratoire est d’étudier les effets d’un enseignement fondé sur l’apprentissage autorégulé à la fois sur les performances et la motivation auprès d’élèves de 5-6 ans scolarisés en grande section maternelle. Cet enseignement est conçu sur le modèle de l’enseignement explicite de stratégies cognitives et métacognitives, facilitant ainsi les processus motivationnels. Le dispositif mis en œuvre dans deux classes permet de comparer deux modalités : des élèves bénéficiant d’un enseignement à l’apprentissage autorégulé et des élèves n’en bénéficiant pas. Pour mettre en place notre démarche nous avons mobilisé des indicateurs de performance et de motivation. Les résultats montrent des améliorations significatives sur les premiers et encourageants sur les seconds.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Things We Love, Brand Love, and the Self

  2025-03-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter looks at the psychology of brand love and other forms of non-interpersonal love (i.e., love for anything that is not a person), with a particular focus on how that is linked to the psychology of the self and identity formation. The brand love literature has grown quite large, with over 14,700 studies referencing this topic. The chapter reviews the most cited published works on non-interpersonal love finding that this work places a heavy emphasis on the way the things we love become part of our identity. It discusses a meta-analysis of neuroscience studies on brand love which concludes that integrating love objects into the self is the fundamental neurological mechanism behind brand love. This chapter reviews many causes of brand love, including the tendency of people to love things that fit with their identity. It also discusses the consequences of brand love for marketers and for consumers who experience this love. Finally, the chapter summarizes a new evolutionary theory presented in Ahuvia that explains why the neural mechanisms that create the self-overlap so much with the neural mechanisms that create love.

  PublisherDOI

• Augmented reality marketing and consumer‒brand relationships: How closeness drives brand love

  Psychology and Marketing · 2024-01-18 · 67 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Marketers use augmented reality (AR) to place virtual brand‐related information into a consumer's physical context. Grounded in the literature on AR, brand love, metaphor theory, and closeness as interpreted by the neural theory of language, the authors theorize that branded AR content can reduce the perceived physical, spatial distance between a consumer and a brand. This perceived closeness subsequently drives the closeness of the emotional relationship in the form of brand love. Two empirical studies validate this framework. Study 1 shows that using an AR app (vs. non‐AR) increases the perceived physical closeness of the brand, which in turn drives brand love (i.e., relationship closeness). Study 2 replicates this finding in a pre‐/post‐use design. Here, high levels of local presence (i.e., the extent to which consumers perceive a brand as actually being present in their physical environment) drive perceived physical closeness, which leads to brand love. We also find that AR's power to generate brand love increases when the consumer is already familiar with the brand. We discuss managerial implications for AR marketing today and in a metaverse future in which AR content might be prevalent in consumers' everyday perceptions of the real world.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Things We Love: How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are

  Advertising & Society Quarterly · 2023-03-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: In this Author Meets Critics book discussion, Aaron Ahuvia uncovers the mystery behind brand love with some of the scholars who inspired him to research it. The Things We Love: How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are (Little, Brown Spark, 2022). He and marketing and material culture specialists met to explore the psychological phenomena surrounding love and the implications for marketers, students, and general readers. The book and this discussion around it explain the person-thing-person relationship in terms of identity, relationships, materialism, and consumerism. The book extolls how anthropomorphism and its opposite, objectification, operate in relationships with objects, brands, and products. The group discusses the ways in which technology is creating new ephemera and new things to love in the form of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

  PublisherDOI

• Materialism and Quality of Life

  2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Materialism and Quality of Life

  Springer eBooks · 2022 · 51 citations

  • Psychology
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  PublisherDOI

• Towards a theory of brand love in services: the power of identity and social relationships

  Journal of service management · 2022 · 51 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Business

  Purpose Building meaningful relationships between consumers and service brands has received significant attention. This paper aims to explore how brand love in services – a relationship between the consumer and the service brand – is created through relationships between the consumer and other people. Specifically, we explore how brand love is created through the social relationships consumers form with other consumers. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper synthesizes the literature on consumer-brand relationships, brand community, social support and service providers, psychological ownership and brand love in the context of services. Findings This paper suggests that consumers love brands that are meaningful to them. Brands can become more meaningful to consumers by facilitating interpersonal connections and helping consumers define their identity. The connection between social relationships with other consumers and brand love is mediated by the consumer's level of perceived membership in the community. For some consumers, perceived membership grows to the point of becoming perceived psychological ownership of the community, where the consumer feels a sense of responsibility for the brand's and the community's well-being. Originality/value This paper advances theoretical understanding of how brand love operates in services and how it can be enhanced through services’ management.

  PublisherDOI

• Research on Happiness and Well-Being

  2021-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Nancy Wong

  World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific

  10 shared

• Rajeev Batra

  Ross School

  10 shared

• Richard P. Bagozzi

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  9 shared

• Philipp A. Rauschnabel

  Universität der Bundeswehr München

  8 shared

• Elif Izberk‐Bilgin

  University of Michigan–Dearborn

  6 shared

• Aric Rindfleisch

  University of Illinois System

  4 shared

• Mara B. Adelman

  4 shared

• Fiona Lee

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• 2007 Distinguished Research Award at the University of Michi…
• 2001 Faculty Member of the Year at the University of Michiga…
• First US government grant project in Libya since the lifting…