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

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.