How Marketing Insight Shapes Brand Engagement and Loyalty: An Integrated Model of Psychological, Behavioural, and Creative Antecedents

Jose Magano; Martim Durao

doi:10.23762/FSO_VOL14_NO2_5

Published : 2026-06-24

Vol. 14 No. 2 (2026)

How Marketing Insight Shapes Brand Engagement and Loyalty: An Integrated Model of Psychological, Behavioural, and Creative Antecedents

Jose Magano

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3169

Martim Durao

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2900-1264

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23762/FSO_VOL14_NO2_5

Abstract

This study proposes and tests an integrated model of marketing insight–a brand's ability to understand and respond to how consumers think, feel, act, and derive meaning–comprising three theoretically grounded dimensions: psychological insight (attachment, self-congruity, brand trust), behavioural insight (habit, participatory behaviours), and creative insight (perceived creativity, narrative authenticity, symbolic resonance). Each dimension is theoretically mapped onto one of the three constitutive components of Consumer Brand Engagement (CBE) theory, ensuring coherence between the antecedent system and the mediating construct. A cross-sectional consumer survey (N = 462) was analysed using PLS-SEM. All three insight dimensions significantly predict brand engagement, which in turn predicts loyalty, with the model explaining 79.2% of variance in engagement and 72.7% in loyalty. Critically, the pathway from insight to loyalty is contingent: creative insight affects loyalty exclusively through engagement (full mediation; VAF = 54.9%), while psychological and behavioural insights retain significant direct routes to loyalty (partial mediation), with behavioural insight exhibiting the strongest direct path (β = 0.480). This contingency finding advances CBE theory by demonstrating that engagement is not a universal relational intermediary–a nuance that prior fragmented, single-antecedent models were structurally unable to detect. The study reconceptualises marketing insight as a measurable antecedent system, empirically differentiates habitual loyalty from engaged loyalty, and provides managers with a diagnostic framework for balancing psychological, behavioural, and creative brand strategies across industry contexts including technology brands, fast-moving consumer goods, and fashion and lifestyle categories.

Keywords:

marketing insight, brand engagement, brand loyalty, attachment theory, semiotics; structural equation modelling.

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Magano, J., & Durao, M. (2026). How Marketing Insight Shapes Brand Engagement and Loyalty: An Integrated Model of Psychological, Behavioural, and Creative Antecedents. Forum Scientiae Oeconomia, 14(2), 87–111. https://doi.org/10.23762/FSO_VOL14_NO2_5

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