Research trends, developments, and future perspectives in brand attitude: A bibliometric analysis utilizing the Scopus database (1944-2021)

Brand attitude has been the primary concern for corporation sustainability for a long. Studies have focused on various attributes concerning brand attitude comprising of many research arti-cles. This study focuses on bibliometric analysis of brand attitude examining 1497 documents published for the years 1944-2021. The purpose of this study is to examine historic research trends, developments, and future conduits based on co-authorship and co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer. The study highlights the most prolific articles containing the most productive authors and their affiliations, keywords, and influential journals, along with future research trends. The result shows that the number of publications follows a very slow trail until 2008, mildly until 2012, following which the cumulative growth in publication increased manifold. Further, results show that researchers from the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan extended many efforts to the global knowledge of literature leading other countries. The emerging hotspot keywords analysis suggests that brand avoidance, subtle, brand betrayal, consumer ethnocen-trism, environmental sustainability and policy, brand activism, brand authenticity, consumer brand engagement, and brand competence are the key areas that attract researchers' attention policymakers as future research boulevards. In the case of consumers' brand attitudes, there is a scarcity of studies that investigated the consumers' implicit and explicit brand attitudes.

Automated summary

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of brand attitude research, examining 1497 documents published from 1944 to 2021. The results show the research trends, developments, and future directions in the field, as well as the contributions of different countries. It also highlights key areas that attract researchers' attention and policymakers' interests.