Brand-Aid

Reimann, Martin; Núñez, Sandra Ríos; Castaño, Raquel

doi:10.1093/jcr/ucx058

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Our findings also converge with past scholarship showing that intense brand relationships can help reduce physical pain due to the brand's ability to provide a feeling of social connectedness (Reimann et al, 2017). As in other research, we demonstrate that deep brand engagement can produce a range of positive effects (Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen, 2010).…”

Section: Life Reconstruction Through Brand Appropriationsupporting

confidence: 90%

Brand magnification: when brands help people reconstruct their lives

Fuschillo

Cayla

Covà

2022

EJM

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Purpose This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct their lives. Design/methodology/approach The authors followed five brand devotees over several years, using various data collection methods (long interviews, observations, videos, photographs and secondary data) to study how they reconstructed their lives with a brand. Findings Consumers transform their existence through a distinctive form of brand appropriation that the authors call brand magnification, which unfolds: materially, narratively and socially. First, brand devotees scatter brand incarnations around themselves to remain in touch with the brand because the brand has become an especially positive dimension of their lives. Second, brand devotees mobilize the brand to craft a completely new life story. Finally, they build a branded clan of family and friends that socially validates their reconstructed identity. Research limitations/implications The research extends more muted depictions of brands as soothing balms calming consumer anxieties; the authors document the mechanism through which consumers remake their lives with a brand. Practical implications The research helps rehabilitate the role of brands in contemporary consumer culture. Organizations can use the findings to help stimulate and engage employees by unveiling the brand’s life-transforming potential for consumers. Originality/value The authors characterize a distinctive, extreme and unique form of brand appropriation that positively transforms consumer lives.

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Section: Life Reconstruction Through Brand Appropriationsupporting

confidence: 90%

Brand magnification: when brands help people reconstruct their lives

Fuschillo

Cayla

Covà

2022

EJM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…These meanings are also “cultural” because consumers draw from cultural models of relating (Clark & Mills, ; Fiske, ) to make sense of their brand relationships (Aggarwal & Law, ). When consumers “love” brands (Ahuvia, ) or have “flings” (Alvarez & Fournier, ), childhood friendships (Connell & Schau, ) or abusive relationships (F. Miller, Fournier, & Allen, ) with them, they recreate and repurpose cultural models about interpersonal relations to guide how they interact (Aggarwal & Larrick, ) and, dare we say, feel (Reimann, Nuñez, & Castaño, ). Similarly to how they create interpersonal relationship narratives (Duck, ), consumers also apply cultural models of relating when they create their own brand stories, complete with main characters and a beginning, middle, and end (Russell & Schau, ; Stern, Thompson, & Arnould, ).…”

Section: Understanding Cultural Meaning Through the Psychological Lensmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Brands Acquire Cultural Meaning

Fournier

Alvarez

2019

J Consum Psychol

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This article endeavors to advance research on the cultural resonance of brands by building bridges between branding scholarship in the consumer psychology tradition and interpretive research regarding brands and their meaning makers. We adopt a cognitivist conceptualization of cultural meaning and focus on the application of interpretive insights to well-established constructs in the consumer psychology of brands: brand associations, product category associations, social identity, and self-identity. This integrative exercise highlights the value of cultural models in explaining the processes whereby brands acquire meaning, and suggests several themes that are under-valued when considering this process problem through a psychological lens: the motivational underpinnings of myths and other cultural meaning models, the relative value of shared cultural and brand meanings versus idiosyncratic meanings, the power and primacy of category-level meaning making over brand-level meaning making, the complex processes whereby brands gain and lose legitimacy, and the influence of lay theories about brands and branding on how consumers co-create meaning for brands.

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“…Engaging in anthropomorphism can help satisfy consumers’ fundamental needs for connection and competence, leading to enhanced well‐being (Chen, Sengupta, & Adaval, ). These anthropomorphized entities have the ability (at least in part) to fulfill people's belongingness needs and inoculate them against the social and psychological pain of loneliness (Reimann, Nuñez, & Castano, ). This sense of connection also elicits in consumers the desire to protect and care for anthropomorphized entities, making consumers more reluctant to discard old products and less likely to refuse prosocial requests (Ahn, Kim, & Aggarwal, ; Chandler & Schwarz, ).…”

Section: The 3 C's Of Anthropomorphismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not only can interactions with anthropomorphized brands and products serve as effective proxies for human interpersonal interactions, anthropomorphized brands, especially loved ones, can even mitigate the negative effects of psychological and physical pain more generally by being a source of social support (Reimann et al., ). In one study, MTurk participants recalled a painful situation and subsequently rated their pain.…”

Section: First C Of Anthropomorphism: Connectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 3 C's of anthropomorphism: Connection, comprehension, and competition

Yang

Aggarwal

McGill

2019

Consumer Psychology Review

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Anthropomorphism, or imbuing nonhuman entities with human traits, is widely prevalent in the marketplace. The last decade of consumer research demonstrates that when imbued with human characteristics, anthropomorphized brands and products become active participants in the consumption experience and are viewed and treated fundamentally differently than those viewed simply as objects. We identify three dimensions around how consumers relate to anthropomorphized entities: connection, comprehension, and competition. The first two C's highlight how anthropomorphized brands and products benefit consumers by fulfilling belongingness needs (connection) and helping consumers understand unfamiliar situations and products (comprehension). In contrast, the competition dimension highlights how anthropomorphized brands and products are perceived as adversaries or potential threats to consumers’ individual goals. By identifying competition as the third C, we illuminate self‐protection as an additional motivation that shapes consumers’ responses to anthropomorphized entities—a motivation that has not been directly accounted for in previous theorizing.

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Brand-Aid

Cited by 19 publications

References 78 publications

Brand magnification: when brands help people reconstruct their lives

Brand magnification: when brands help people reconstruct their lives

How Brands Acquire Cultural Meaning

The 3 C's of anthropomorphism: Connection, comprehension, and competition

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