Models for brand relationships

Abstract

Brands have evolved over time and today are seen not only as facilitators of transactions but also as human-like entities that consumers, engage, interact, experience and co-create meaning and value (Veloutsou and Guzm an, 2017). In principle, brands underpin the development of two different types of brand-centric relationships – individual and collective (Veloutsou, 2009). Consumers and brands may engage as independent entities and form a relationship that connects them, commonly called consumer brand relationships or, simply, brand relationships (Fournier, 1998; Veloutsou, 2007). In brand relationships, consumers often develop deep bonds with brands (Alvarez and Fournier, 2016), even in cases that they do not own the brand (Kumar and Nayak, 2019). Consumers may also try to identify other like-minded individuals, with similar brand related views and feelings, with whom they develop brand-centric collectives, sub-cultural groups, tribes or brand communities (Kozinets, 2001; Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; Cova and Pace, 2006; Badrinarayanan and Sierra, 2018). Members of brand-centric collectives spend time engaging around a brand, sharing information, enjoying and expressing themselves and their strong views of the brand (Cova and Pace, 2006;Wallace et al., 2014). The concept of brand relationships evolved from a research idea, to a research stream, into an entire research field within marketing. The conceptual work started over three decades ago when Shimp and Madden (1988) introduced the concept of consumer object relationship that was further conceptually developed by contributors such as Blackstone (1993) and Fajer and Schouten (1995). As in all evolving fields, the original conceptual work led first to an exploratory investigation of the phenomenon (Fournier, 1998; Ji, 2002), then its measurement (Aaker et al., 2004; Veloutsou, 2007), to a very rapid and sharp growth of the papers and the scope of the academic engagement. To date, thousands of academic articles have been published in the area (Fetscherin and Heinrich, 2015; Albert and Thomson, 2018; Fetscherin et al., 2019; Veloutsou and Ruiz-Mafé, 2020), and many concepts have been identified as, and associated to, descriptors of various forms of brand relationships (Albert and Thomson, 2018). In recent years, the concept also spanned to practitioners who developed and published measurement instruments related to brand relationships such as the Edelman’s Trust Barometer [1], the Brand Index by YouGov [2], the Experience Brand Index [3] by Jack Morton, the Brand Affinity Report by Rakuten, the Brand Intimacy Study [4] by MBLM, the Loyalty Report [5] by Bond Brand Loyalty, Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index [6], or the Brand Passion Report [7] by NetBase, just tomention a few. The exploratory work on the nature of collective or group brand relationships started about the same time as the exploratory work on individual consumer brand relationships (Kozinets, 2001; Muñiz andO’Guinn, 2001;McAlexander et al., 2002), and as then both have attracted a lot of academic interest. The literature on brand-centric communities is quickly expanding, focuses primarily on brand communities, and can be organised into two interrelated clusters: a cluster concentrating on the role of participation in brand communities in the creation of brand-related outcomes, and a cluster concentrating on the social interaction and drivers to participation in these brand-centric groups (Veloutsou and RuizMafé, 2020). Because brand-centric relationships require consumers to be active and highly involved participants for the formation and development of brand-centric groups, often brands actively try to help these relationships flourish with the likely or desired outcome of achieving brand-related benefits. Therefore, although brand communities may be created and managed by the companies behind the brands or by passionate consumers with specific views about the brand (Dholakia and Vianello, 2011; Pedeliento et al., 2020), most of the current research primarily focuses on company facilitated brand communities. The brand-centric relationships research started about 20years ago looking at concepts related to positive relationships. Individual brand relationships research started over 20years ago by looking at various degrees of positive relationship concepts such as brand satisfaction (Keiningham et al., 2014), brand attachment (Japutra et al., 2014), positive word of mouth (Keller, 2007), brand love (Batra et al., 2012), brand evangelism (Becerra and Badrinarayanan, 2013) and brand loyalty (Amine, 1998). Collective brand relationships research examines supportive brand communities and the positive brand outcomes they generate (Veloutsou and Ruiz-Mafé, 2020), non-supportive antibrand communities and their possible negative brand outcomes, and considers that collective and individual brand relationships are concurrent (Coelho et al., 2019; Dessart et al., 2020). Although the focus of brand-centric research is still mostly on positive relationships and outcomes (Albert andThomson, 2018; Veloutsou and Ruiz-Mafé, 2020), recent research also explores concepts related to negative brand relationships or feelings such as complaining (Huefner et al., 2002), brand avoidance (Lee et al., 2009; Knittel et al., 2016), brand retaliation (Thomson et al., 2012) or brand hate (Kucuk, 2010; Zarantonello et al., 2016, 2018; Hegner et al., 2017; Fetscherin, 2019). Recent research also explores the drivers and outcomes of participating in antibrand communities (Popp et al., 2016; Dessart et al., 2020; Rodrigues et al., 2020), how the nature of brand-centric relationships may change over time (Jain and Sharma, 2019;