Brand relationship

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 purchase, 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 1990’s 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. 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.

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. Fournier took this idea of an active brand partner and ran with it, publishing a thesis in 1994 titled “A Consumer-Brand Relationship Framework for Strategic Brand Management” that (1) argued for the validity of the relationship metaphor in understanding consumer-brand behaviors and (2) provided empirical evidence for the different types of relationships operating in the commercial landscape and the developmental processes that governed them over time.

Nearly a quarter of a century later 25 years, 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 and book chapters on brand relationships have been published, along with three books (MacInnis, Park and Priester, 2009; Fournier, Breazeale and Fetscherin, 2012; Fetscherin and Heilmann 2015 ). The Consumer Brand Relationships Association (CBRA) was founded in 2013 to provide a community for academics and practitioners. CBRA organizes regularly an international academic conference as well as a a global summit for practitioners on the topic of brand relationships.

Relationship Types

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

Lower-order relationships	Higher-order relationships
Potential friends / Causal friends	Close friends / Best friends / Crucial friends
Brand trying / Brand liking	Multi-brand loyalty / Brand loyalty / Brand addiction

Later, Fournier (1998) provides a typology of 12 brand relationships derived from phenomenological research

Compartmentalized friendships	Arranged marriage	Rebounds	Dependencies	Secret affairs
Marriages of convenience	Committed partnerships	Best friendships	Childhood friendships	Flings
Kinships	Courtships	Enmities	Enslavement	Casual friends/buddies

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.

• Self connective Attachment
• Satisfaction
• Behavioral Commitment
• Trust
• Emotional Intimacy

Relationship Strength and the Consumer-Brand Bond

Brand Attachment

Brand Love. Many studies evoke the concept of brand loved on Sternberg' Triangular theory of love. Some argue that brand love is similar to interpersonal love while others (e.g., Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi, 2012) state that "there are compelling reasons these conceptualizations of interpersonal love should not be applied directly to brand love" (Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi, 2012, p. 1). Some suggest brand love is more a parasocial love relationship (Fetscherin, 2014)

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

• Love/Passion
• Brand-Self Identity Connection
• Brand-Social Other Communal connection
• Commitment
• Interdependence
• Intimacy
• Brand partner quality

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.

Love and passion is the essence of all strong brand relationships. It refers to the depth of the emotional connection between that brand and the consumer. A study conducted by Fournier (1998) found that the informants with strong brand relationships felt strong affection towards their brand and when they have not used their product for a while, they would feel like they were missing something. These informants would hold their brands so strongly that they were described as being one of a kind, and irreplaceable.

Self-connection is the extent to which the brand conveys important identity concerns, tasks, or themes, therefore communicates a significant aspect of self. A strong brand relationship is maintained by strong self-connections to the brand. This is due to the ever-growing protective feelings of uniqueness, dependency, and encouragement of resilience in the face of negative events.

Interdependence involves regular interactions between the brand and the consumer, increased scope and diversity of brand-related actions, and the increased intensity of personal experiences.

Commitment refers to the stability of the consumer’s attitude towards the brand relationship, and can be seen as the intention and dedication to the longevity of the relationship. Informants in the study Fournier (1988) conducted, openly acknowledged their commitment to their brands, showing how strongly they feel about their brands. This reinforces the notion that high commitment levels to brands lead to strong brand relationships.

Intimacy refers to how close the consumers feel with the brand, and also refers to the mutual understanding and acceptance of both the brand and the consumer.

Brand partner quality represents what the consumer thinks about the performance of the brand in the relationship. The factors of this quality are trust, reliability, and expectation fulfilment.

Brand Community

When there is a group of people who have the same strong consumer-brand bond, it leads to forming brand communities. A brand community is defined through four structures of relationship. This includes the relationships between a consumer and a product, a brand, a company, and other consumers/owners. There are three traditional principles of community; consciousness of kind, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral. Consciousness of kind is the underlying connection consumers feel towards each other, and the mutual sense of difference from other consumers not in the community. Next, rituals and traditions are important in aiding the continuity of the community’s meanings, history, and culture. And lastly, Stokburger-Sauer (2010) states that the community members feel a sense of duty towards the community as a whole and also to the individual. Because brand communities are communities with consumers who have a deep sense of responsibility to their brand, they are essential factors of the brand they cherish. This is because even when their brand is gaining negative publicity outside of the community, the brand community, if the bond is strong enough, will still stand by their brand, and will maintain the brand’s attitude and meaning.

Brand Relationship Outcomes

Positive brand relationship outcomes

• Word of mouth
• Purchase intention
• Purchase behavior

Negative brand relationship outcomes

• Negative word of mouth
• Public complaining
• Brand avoidance
• Brand divorce
• Brand retaliation

Advertisers, for a long time, would spend more money on bringing in new customers rather than on building up relationships they had with current customers, but this has changed completely since then. Now marketers are encouraged to reinforce consumer-brand relationships, and is an ongoing important research topic for many reasons. Having this sort of relationship produces many benefits for the company such as reduced marketing costs, ease of access to customers, acquiring new customers, customer retention, brand equity, and more profit.

Brand relationships produce many outcomes, most of which are positive. The stronger the consumer-brand relationships tend to be, the more likely it is to produce positive results for all parties involved in the relationship, not just the company. The customers’ social needs are satisfied through the relationships they have built and maintained with the brand, while the brand gains adherence and advocacy from these consumers. This loyalty or strong bond with the customers is crucial for when the brand is subject to negative information or negative publicity, as this negativity can be detrimental to the consumer-brand relationship. However, if the consumer-brand relationship is strong enough, it has the capability to aid in the maintenance of the brand attitudes in light of the negative information.

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. Antagonistic associations create aversive brand relationships, and is also generated by marketing advances that are uninvited, incessent, or too intense according to Fournier and Alvarez (2013). This sort of negative relationship affects not only the brand but also the consumer. According to Fournier and Alvarez (2013), brands are damaged by brand antagonists who make parodies and doppelganger images that can diminish the brand meanings and equity. And in extreme cases their company assets can be destroyed.

Related Concepts

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:

• Brand love
• Brand attachment
• Brand community
• Brand passion
• Brand hate
• Brand avoidance
• Brand engagement
• Cult brand

More recently, Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014), present the Brand Connection Matrix. as summarized below in the table.

	Low Emotional Connection	High Emotional Connection
High Functional Connection	Functionally invested	Fully Invested
Low Functional Connection	Un-invested	Emotionally invested

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

	Weak Relationship	Strong Relationship
Positive Feelings	E.g., Brand Satisfaction	E.g., Brand Passion/Brand Love/Brand Loyalty
Negative Feelings	E.g., Brand Avoidance	E.g., Brand Hate/Brand Divorce

Bibliography

• Batra, R, Ahuvia, A., and Bagozzi, R., (2012), Brand love, Journal of Marketing, 76(2), pp. 1–16.
• Blackstone, M. (1993), Beyond Brand Personality: Building Brand Relationships, in Brand Equity & Advertising: Advertising's Role in Building Strong Brands, (eds.) David A. Aaker, and Alexander Biel, pp. 113–124.
• Marc Fetscherin, (2014) "What type of relationship do we have with loved brands?", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 31 Iss: 6/7, pp. 430 - 440
• Fetscherin, M., and Heinrich, D. (2014), "Consumer Brand Relationships: A Research Landscape", Journal of Brand Management, Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 366–371.
• Fournier, S. (1998), Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research, 24(4), pp. 343–373.
• Fournier, S., Breazeale, and M., Fetscherin, M. (2012), Consumer-Brand Relationships: Theory and Practice, Routledge, pp. 456.
• MacInnis, D., Park, W., and Priester, J. (2009), Handbook of Brand Relationships, M.E.Sharpe, pp. 424.
• Fajer, M. and John W. Schouten (1995), "Breakdown and Dissolution of Person-Brand Relationships", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 22, eds. Frank R. Kardes and Mita Sujan, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 663-667.

External links

• Brand Love Scale
• Fournier, S. (1998), Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research
• Fournier, S., Breazeale, M., and Fetscherin, M. (2012), Introduction Chapter of the Book "Consumer Brand Relationships: Theory and Practice
• Breakdown and Dissolution of Person-Brand Relationships