Brand relationships

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 with her thesis in 1994 titled "A Consumer-Brand Relationship Framework for Strategic Brand Management".

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, book chapters or books on brand relationships have been published on this topic. Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) conducted an extensive literature review on this topic and analyzed 392 papers by 685 authors in 101 journals. They concluded brand relationships is 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) 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".

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