Brand Externalities: A Taxonomy

Abstract

Brands are ubiquitous and adorn contemporary marketing systems. Modern branding practices spawn contradictory social mechanisms, value co-creation and value co-destruction. This paper considers the societal implications, including personal, psychological, social, ecological, and economic consequences of branding. It posits brand externalities as meaning-led discrepancies and symbolic spill-overs igniting mechanisms detrimental to the integrity of the social system. Brand externalities accompany the assortment of brands in contemporary marketing systems. We propose a taxonomy of brand externalities and elucidate societal consequences of branding upon brand exchange actors themselves, their immediate others, future others and general others. This stakeholder orientation sets a future research agenda and calls for redefining branding from the system’s perspective.

Brand systems: integrating branding research perspectives

“…Srivastava et al (1998) recognised the need to integrate a wider community of public, government and regulatory authorities, in addition to customers, channels and lateral partners. Similarly, Padela et al (2021) argued that brand actors include the brand-exchange neighbourhood, future generations and society, in addition to the firm and consumers. The interests and expectations of system actors are interrelated (Domegan et al, 2019).…”

A Goods-Dominant—Service-Dominant Perspective on Counterfeiting

“…Such consumers revere and promote the original brand—which was created as a result of GD processes. Brand value, therefore, is “co-created within the micro-domain of consumers and firms” and “aggregates at the macro-level” (Padela, Wooliscroft, and Ganglmair-Wooliscroft 2021, p. 357).…”

Shop-hop till you drop! The effect of the image gap on spillover patronage within retail agglomerations

“…Spillover shopping is a specific type of brand externality (Padela et al, 2020) related to the symbolism of brand images within broader marketing systems (Kadirov and Varey, 2011;Conejo and Wooliscroft, 2015). Padela et al (2020) review mostly negative externalities pertaining the symbolic nature of brands which allows them to develop an insightful typology of brand effects.…”

“…Spillover shopping is a specific type of brand externality (Padela et al, 2020) related to the symbolism of brand images within broader marketing systems (Kadirov and Varey, 2011;Conejo and Wooliscroft, 2015). Padela et al (2020) review mostly negative externalities pertaining the symbolic nature of brands which allows them to develop an insightful typology of brand effects. Moreover, the existing literature explores the following types of spillover effects: advertising spillover between parent brand and sub-brand within the same brand family (Balachander and Ghose, 2003), spillover of one attribute to another (Ahluwalia et al, 2001), and spillover among advertisements of different brands (Erdem and Sum, 2002).…”