Brand relationship

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A consumer-brand relationship, also known as a brand relationship, is the relationship that consumers think, feel, and have with a product or company brand. [1] For more than half a century, scholarship has been generated to help managers and stakeholders understand how to drive favorable brand attitudes, brand loyalty, repeat purchases, customer lifetime value, customer advocacy, and communities of like-minded individuals organized around brands. Research has progressed with inspiration from attitude theory and, later, socio-cultural theories, but a perspective introduced in the early 1990s offered new opportunities and insights. The new paradigm focused on the relationships that formed between brands and consumers: an idea that had gained traction in business-to-business marketing scholarship where physical relationships formed between buyers and sellers.

Contents

History

Two catalysts can be credited for the brand relationship paradigm. Max Blackston's 1992 piece, "Observations: Building Brand Equity by Managing the Brand's Relationships," highlighted for the first time that brands themselves were active partners in a relationship, and called for attention not just to people's perceptions of and attitudes toward brands, but also to the reciprocating construct: what people thought the brand thought of them. [2] Susan Fournier took this idea of an active brand partner with her thesis in 1994 titled "A Consumer-Brand Relationship Framework for Strategic Brand Management". [1]

Nearly 25 years later, there now exists a robust and varied scholarly sub-discipline on brand relationships, with contributions from a range of theoretical disciplines including social and cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology, culture studies, and economics, and methods from empirical modeling to experiments, ethnography, and depth interviewing. Hundreds of articles, book chapters and books on brand relationships have been published on this topic. Fetscherin and Heinrich in 2014 [3] conducted an extensive literature review on this topic and analyzed 392 papers by 685 authors in 101 journals. They concluded brand relationships are notably interdisciplinary with publications in many different fields such as applied psychology, communication as well as business management and marketing. They identified seven sub-research streams consisting (1) relationship between various constructs such as brand loyalty, trust, commitment, attachment, personality; (2) the effects of CBR on consumer behavior; (3) brand love; (4) brand communities; (5) CBR and culture and brand cult; (6) self–brand-connections (e.g., self-congruence); and (7) storytelling and brand relationships. The Consumer Brand Relationships Association (CBRA) is the world's leading network for practitioners and academics interested in the study of the relationships consumers have with brands. Their website states that "to promote this field, advance knowledge, facilitate the exchange of information, and encourage collaboration".

Relationship types

Fajer and Schouten (1995) present the Typology of Loyalty-Ordered Person-Brand Relationships as summarized below in the table. [4]

Lower-order relationshipsHigher-order relationships
Potential friends / Casual friendsClose friends / Best friends / Crucial friends
Brand trying / Brand likingMulti-brand loyalty / Brand loyalty / Brand addiction

Later, Fournier (1998) provides a typology of 15 brand relationships derived from phenomenological research [5]

Compartmentalized friendships Arranged marriage Rebounds DependenciesSecret affairs
Marriages of convenience Committed partnershipsBest friendshipsChildhood friendshipsFlings
Kinships Courtships Enmities Enslavement Casual friends

A more abstract typology is also supported that distinguishes exchange versus communal relationships. Aggarwal provides a theory that distinguishes these two basic brand relationship types according to the exchange norms that operate within them.

Hyun Kyung Kim, Moonkyu Lee, and Yoon Won Lee (2005) in their paper Developing a Scale For Measuring Brand Relationship Quality present the following dimensions to measure brand relationship quality.

Max Blackston, in his 2018 book "Brand Love is not Enough" elaborates the concept of a Brand's Attitude, that was first proposed in his 1992 paper "A Brand with an Attitude." He describes five Universal Brand Relationships, each defined by a specific type of Brand Image and a specific type of Brand's Attitude. They are:

  1. Reinforcement - the consumer's perception of the superior performance of brand, combined with the perception that the brand makes the consumer better ( smarter, more effective) too.
  2. Identification - the consumer loves the brand because it reflects and expresses his/her own values and aspirations. Crucially, the consumer's love of the brand is felt to be reciprocated.
  3. Role Model - combines Brand Charisma, the perception that the brand has a progressive style of leadership and innovation, with Mentoring, the feeling that the brand encourages and enables the consumer to lift their game to a higher level too.
  4. Self-Differentiation - Brand Differentiation, the engine of brand growth, combined with a perception that the brand is "there for me", that its points of difference include and define the customer too.
  5. Playful - the brand embodies the pleasure principle (fun, cool, easy, relaxing) with the perception that it wants to give pleasure to its consumer unconditionally.

Relationship models

Brand attachment

Many studies compare "brand love" to the concept of interpersonal love as placed on Sternbergs triangular theory of love. Some argue that brand love is similar to interpersonal love while others, such as Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi (2012) state that "there are compelling reasons these conceptualizations of interpersonal love should not be applied directly to brand love" [6] (p. 1). Some suggest brand love is more a parasocial love relationship. [7] [8]

Multi-faceted strength notions are also recommended. Among these are Fournier's Brand Relationship Quality index, which has seven facets:

Through an analysis conducted by Fournier (1998), a six faceted brand relationship quality construct was drafted. There are dimensions in a relationship in which they all determine the strength of a consumer-brand relationship, these dimensions include: love and passion, self-connection, interdependence, commitment, intimacy, and brand partner quality. [9]

Brand community

According to Stokburger-Sauer (2010), a brand community is a group of people who have the same consumer-brand bond. This can be defined through the relationships between a consumer and a product, a brand, a company, and other consumers/owners. [10] Stokburger-Sauer say that when a community's brand may continue to support a brand despite negative publicity. [11]

Brand intimacy

"Brand intimacy" attempts to measure the level of emotional connection a brand has with its customers. Using the concept of emotional branding that an emotional response, as opposed to rational thought, dominates a customer's buying choice, brand intimacy ascribes a qualitative approach to the emotional connection between brand and customer.

Brand intimacy posits that in order for a brand to succeed, it must appeal and connect with a customer's emotions. [12]

Compared to Standard & Poor's and the Fortune 500's top brands, brand's ranked highly in intimacy outperform in revenue and profit annually and also over a duration of time. [13]

The brand intimacy model attempts to analyze the relationship a consumer has with a brand. [14] It is described as having three different levels: sharing, bonding, and fusing, [15] each representing an increasing level of trust and emotional attachment a customer has to a particular brand. [16] The goal of brand intimacy is to create long-term purchasing relationships between consumers and particular companies. [17]

Stages

Although emotional connection is necessary for brand intimacy, not every customer who has formed an emotional connection with a brand necessarily reaches a stage of brand intimacy. Instead, the forming of an intimate relationship between brand and customer (or user of a brand) is often completed in a series of stages of increasing intimacy. [18]

These stages are: [19]

  1. Sharing - The user gains an understanding of the brand, its purpose and reputation; the company in control of the brand also gains an understanding of the brand's user or audience base. [20]
  2. Bonding - the level of intimacy between user and brand strengthens. [20]
  3. Fusing - a brand has not only formed a part of the user's daily experience, the brand often provides a service that the user cannot live without. [21]

Findings

Brand intimacy has been studied in various industries to provided data into the emotional connection brands have with their customers. [22] [23] [24]

Among brands, Apple has consistently scored the highest of all brands for brand intimacy, [12] [25] with Amazon and Disney also measuring competitively for brand intimacy. [26]

Outcomes

Positive brand relationship outcomes

Negative brand relationship outcomes

Historically advertisers spend money on bringing in new customers rather than on building up relationships with existing customers. [27] Modern marketers attempt to reinforce consumer-brand relationships, which produces benefits for the company such as reduced marketing costs, ease of access to customers, acquiring new customers, customer retention, brand equity, and more profit. [27]

The stronger the consumer-brand relationships tend to be, the more likely it is to produce positive results. [10]

There are gaps in what marketers know about negative relationships, which can cause problems for brands. [28] The negative information consumers hear are more enduring, diagnostic, and conspicuous, and also it is deeply processed in the mind, and is more likely to be shared within social groups than positive information. [28] This would explain why some strong positive brand relationships can readily turn into hateful, antagonistic associations. [28]

There are many different concepts and facets studied and related to consumers' relationships to brands (e.g., love styles). These relationships can be positive or negative (love hate relationships). Below a few of those concepts studied in brand relationships: [29]

Fetscherin and Heinrichresent the Brand Connection Matrix. as summarized below in the table [30]

Low Emotional ConnectionHigh Emotional Connection
High Functional ConnectionFunctionally investedFully Invested
Low Functional ConnectionUn-investedEmotionally invested

Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) also present another taxonomy, the Brand Feeling Matrix as summarized below in the table.

Weak RelationshipStrong Relationship
Positive FeelingsE.g., Brand SatisfactionE.g., Brand Passion/Brand Love/Brand Loyalty
Negative FeelingsE.g., Brand AvoidanceE.g., Brand Hate/Brand Divorce

Related Research Articles

Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors. It is different from the concept of brand awareness. In order to position products or brands, companies may emphasize the distinguishing features of their brand or they may try to create a suitable image through the marketing mix. Once a brand has achieved a strong position, it can become difficult to reposition it. To effectively position a brand and create a lasting brand memory, brands need to be able to connect to consumers in an authentic way, creating a brand persona usually helps build this sort of connection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consumer behaviour</span> Study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all the activities associated with consuming

Consumer behaviour is the study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. It encompasses how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, marketing, and economics.

In marketing, promotion refers to any type of marketing communication used to inform target audiences of the relative merits of a product, service, brand or issue, persuasively. It helps marketers to create a distinctive place in customers' mind, it can be either a cognitive or emotional route. The aim of promotion is to increase brand awareness, create interest, generate sales or create brand loyalty. It is one of the basic elements of the market mix, which includes the four Ps, i.e., product, price, place, and promotion.

In marketing and consumer behaviour, brand loyalty describes a consumer's persistent positive feelings towards a familiar brand and their dedication to purchasing the brand's products and/or services repeatedly regardless of deficiencies, a competitor's actions, or changes in the market environment. It can also be demonstrated with other behaviors such as positive word-of-mouth advocacy. Corporate brand loyalty is where an individual buys products from the same manufacturer repeatedly and without wavering, rather than from other suppliers. In a business-to-business context, the term "source loyalty" may also be used. Loyalty implies dedication and should not be confused with habit, its less-than-emotional engagement and commitment. Businesses whose financial and ethical values rest in large part on their brand loyalty are said to use the loyalty business model.

Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as "most noticeable or important." The concept is discussed in communication, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science. It has been studied with respect to interpersonal communication, persuasion, politics, and its influence on mass media.

A lifestyle brand is a brand that attempts to embody the values, aspirations, interests, attitudes, or opinions of a group or a culture for marketing purposes. Lifestyle brands seek to inspire, guide, and motivate people, with the goal of making their products contribute to the definition of the consumer's way of life. As such, they are closely associated with the advertising and other promotions used to gain mind share in their target market. They often operate from an ideology, hoping to attract a relatively high number of people and ultimately become a recognised social phenomenon.

Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals." Enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty are pivotal for businesses, given the significant importance of improving the balance between customer attitudes before and after the consumption process.

In marketing, segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) is a framework that implements market segmentation. Market segmentation is a process, in which groups of buyers within a market are divided and profiled according to a range of variables, which determine the market characteristics and tendencies. The S-T-P framework implements market segmentation in three steps:

Brand extension or brand stretching is a marketing strategy in which a firm marketing a product with a well-developed image uses the same brand name in a different product category. The new product is called a spin-off.

The social penetration theory (SPT) proposes that as relationships develop, interpersonal communication moves from relatively shallow, non-intimate levels to deeper, more intimate ones. The theory was formulated by psychologists Irwin Altman of the University of Utah and Dalmas Taylor of the University of Delaware in 1973 to understand relationship development between individuals. Altman and Taylor noted that relationships "involve different levels of intimacy of exchange or degree of social penetration". SPT is known as an objective theory as opposed to an interpretive theory, meaning it is based on data drawn from actual experiments and not simply from conclusions based on individuals' specific experiences.

A brand community is a concept in marketing and consumer research which postulates that human beings form communities on the basis of attachment to a brand or marque. A brand community refers to structured social relationships in which participants share admiration and connection of a brand that they experience through shared rituals, traditions and a sense of responsibility towards other members. The term often refers to the intersection between brand, individual identity and culture.

Brand aversion is an antonym of brand loyalty. It is a distrust or a dislike of products from a particular brand on the basis of experiences with that brand and its products, similar to taste aversion. Brand aversion, also called brand hate, can lead to brand avoidance, but it is not the same. Both with brand aversion and brand avoidance, the feelings towards the brand are negative. Only the difference is that the strength of those negative feelings/relationship towards the brand are weak with brand avoidance and strong with brand aversion. Moreover, experiencing brand aversion is more intense and stronger than experiencing brand dislike.

Customer experience, sometimes abbreviated to CX, is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral customer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brand</span> Identification for a good or service

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and store value as brand equity for the object identified, to the benefit of the brand's customers, its owners and shareholders. Brand names are sometimes distinguished from generic or store brands.

Consumer neuroscience is the combination of consumer research with modern neuroscience. The goal of the field is to find neural explanations for consumer behaviors in individuals both with or without disease.

Emotional branding is a term used within marketing communication that refers to the practice of building brands that appeal directly to a consumer's emotional state, needs and aspirations. Emotional branding is successful when it triggers an emotional response in the consumer, that is, a desire for the advertised brand that cannot fully be rationalized. Emotional brands have a significant impact when the consumer experiences a strong and lasting attachment to the brand comparable to a feeling of bonding, companionship or love. Examples of emotional branding include the nostalgic attachment to the Kodak brand of film, bonding with the Jim Beam bourbon brand, and love for the McDonald's brand.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the communication between consumers about a product, service, or company in which the sources are considered independent of direct commercial influence that has been actively influenced or encouraged as a marketing effort. While it is difficult to truly control word of mouth communication, there are three generic avenues to 'manage' word of mouth communication for the purpose of word-of-mouth marketing, including:

Fan loyalty is the loyalty felt and expressed by a fan towards the object of his/her fanaticism. Fan Loyalty is often used in the context of sports and the support of a specific team or institution. Fan loyalties can range from a passive support to radical allegiance and expressions of loyalty can take shape in many forms and be displayed across varying platforms. Fan loyalty can be threatened by team actions. The loyalties of sports fans in particular have been studied by psychologists, who have determined several factors that help to create such loyalties.

Richard Paul Bagozzi is an Italian American behavioral and social scientist most known for his work in theory, methodology and empirical research. He is the Dwight F. Benton Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the University of Michigan.

Consumer value is used to describe a consumer's strong relative preference for certain subjectively evaluated product or service attributes.

References

  1. 1 2 Fournier, Susan (1998). "Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research". Journal of Consumer Research. 24 (4): 343–353. doi:10.1086/209515. ISSN   0093-5301.
  2. ↑ Blackston, Max (1 Nov 2000). "Observations: Building Brand Equity by Managing the Brand's Relationships". Journal of Advertising Research. 40 (6): 101–105. doi:10.2501/JAR-40-6-101-105. S2CID   166857073.
  3. ↑ Fetscherin, Marc; Heinrich, Daniel (2015). "Consumer brand relationships research: A bibliometric citation meta-analysis". Journal of Business Research. 68 (2): 380–390. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.06.010.
  4. ↑ Schouten, John W.; Fajer, Mary T. (1995). "Breakdown and Dissolution of Person-Brand Relationships". Acr North American Advances. NA-22.
  5. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-12-21. Retrieved 2014-05-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. ↑ Batra, Ahuvia, & Bagozzi, R., S., & R. (March 2012). "Brand Love" (PDF). Journal of Marketing. 76 (2): 1–16. doi:10.1509/jm.09.0339. S2CID   220590587.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ parasocial love relationship; (Fetscherin, 2014).
  8. ↑ Fournier, S., Breazeale, M., and Fetscherin, M. (2012), Introduction Chapter of the Book "Consumer Brand Relationships: Theory and Practice
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Thorbjørnsen, Helge; Supphellen, Magne; Nysveen, Herbjørn; Pedersen, Per Egil (2002-01-01). "Building brand relationships online: A comparison of two interactive applications". Journal of Interactive Marketing. 16 (3): 17–34. doi:10.1002/dir.10034. hdl: 11250/299131 . S2CID   53603898.
  10. 1 2 Stokburger-Sauer, Nicola (2010-04-01). "Brand community: Drivers and outcomes". Psychology and Marketing. 27 (4): 347–368. doi:10.1002/mar.20335. ISSN   1520-6793.
  11. ↑ Swaminathan, Vanitha; Page, Karen L.; Gürhan-Canli, Zeynep (2007-08-01). ""My" Brand or "Our" Brand: The Effects of Brand Relationship Dimensions and Self-Construal on Brand Evaluations". Journal of Consumer Research. 34 (2): 248–259. doi:10.1086/518539. ISSN   0093-5301.
  12. 1 2 "This Study Says Apple Is the World's Most Intimate Brand". Fortune. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  13. ↑ "Apple remains the world's most intimate brand". www.digitaljournal.com. 2018-03-15. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  14. ↑ Luca Petruzzellis, Russell S. Winer (2016). Rediscovering the Essentiality of Marketing: Proceedings of the 2015 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) World Marketing Congress. Springer. p. 210. ISBN   9783319298771.
  15. ↑ Dawn Iacobucci (2001). Kellogg on Marketing. John Wiley. p. 238.
  16. ↑ Richard Rosenbaum-Elliott, Larry Percy, Simon Pervan (2015). Strategic Brand Management. Oxford University Press. p. 38. ISBN   9780198704201.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  17. ↑ V. Kumar (2008). Managing Customers for Profit: Strategies to Increase Profits and Build Loyalty. Prentice Hall Professional. p. 193. ISBN   9780132716215.
  18. ↑ "The Principles of Brand Intimacy". Branding Strategy Insider. 2018-04-17. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  19. ↑ Aaker, David A. (2011-01-25). Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   978-0-470-61358-0.
  20. 1 2 ""Brand Intimacy" - An Interview with Mario Natarelli". The Marketing Journal. June 3, 2018. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  21. ↑ ""Brand Intimacy" – An Interview with Mario Natarelli" . Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  22. ↑ "Apps and social media platforms lack brand intimacy, study finds". Marketing Dive. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  23. ↑ Nonninger, Lea. "Consumers don't feel connected to brands in financial services". Business Insider. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  24. ↑ "Appliances Industry Ranked Second to Last in MBLM's Brand Intimacy 2018 Report". Kitchen & Bath Business. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  25. ↑ Vena, Danny (2018-03-18). "The 5 Brands Consumers Love Most -". The Motley Fool. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  26. ↑ Greenberg, Gregg (2017-02-02). "Why 'Intimate' Brands Like Amazon, Apple and Netflix Beat the Market". TheStreet. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  27. 1 2 Smit, Edith; Bronner, Fred; Tolboom, Maarten (2007-06-01). "Brand relationship quality and its value for personal contact". Journal of Business Research. Consumer Personality and Individual Differences. 60 (6): 627–633. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.06.012.
  28. 1 2 3 Fournier, Susan; Alvarez, Claudio (2013-04-01). "Relating badly to brands". Journal of Consumer Psychology. 23 (2): 253–264. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2013.01.004. S2CID   143174062.
  29. ↑ Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research Archived 2014-12-21 at the Wayback Machine ; Fournier, S. (1998)
  30. ↑ Fetscherin, Marc; Heinrich, Daniel (2015-02-01). "Consumer brand relationships research: A bibliometric citation meta-analysis". Journal of Business Research. 68 (2): 380–390. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.06.010. ISSN   0148-2963.

Bibliography

Further reading

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