Brand relationship

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. 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.
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. 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".
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 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".
Fajer and Schouten (1995) present the Typology of Loyalty-Ordered Person-Brand Relationships as summarized below in the table.
Later, Fournier (1998) provides a typology of 15 brand relationships derived from phenomenological research
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:
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" (p. 1). Some suggest brand love is more a parasocial love relationship.
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.
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. Stokburger-Sauer say that when a community's brand may continue to support a brand despite negative publicity.
"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.
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.
The brand intimacy model attempts to analyze the relationship a consumer has with a brand. It is described as having three different levels: sharing, bonding, and fusing, each representing an increasing level of trust and emotional attachment a customer has to a particular brand. The goal of brand intimacy is to create long-term purchasing relationships between consumers and particular companies.
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.
These stages are:
Brand intimacy has been studied in various industries to provided data into the emotional connection brands have with their customers.
Among brands, Apple has consistently scored the highest of all brands for brand intimacy, with Amazon and Disney also measuring competitively for brand intimacy.
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. 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.
The stronger the consumer-brand relationships tend to be, the more likely it is to produce positive results.
There are gaps in what marketers know about negative relationships, which can cause problems for brands. 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. This would explain why some strong positive brand relationships can readily turn into hateful, antagonistic associations.
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:
Fetscherin and Heinrichresent the Brand Connection Matrix. as summarized below in the table
Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) also present another taxonomy, the Brand Feeling Matrix as summarized below in the table.