How Brands Acquire Cultural Meaning

Abstract

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.

Branding in a Hyperconnected World: Refocusing Theories and Rethinking Boundaries

“…As marketers are losing some control over the meaning consumers associate with brands, more brand-related stakeholders are involved in shaping brand associations. Entities other than corporations (e.g., ideas, people) are becoming more systematic in their branding efforts (Fournier and Eckhart 2019; Thomson 2006), as hyperconnectivity has allowed them to easily reach multiple stakeholders around the world. The reach of both traditional brands and newer branded entities has also broadened to include stakeholders who have not necessarily been consistently targeted in the past, such as employees, donors, partners, citizen-voters, and activists, as well as local communities, governments, and society as a whole.…”

“…These methods need to be updated to reflect the role of brands in a hyperconnected world. For example, as brands are increasingly deriving their appeal from cultural meanings, some pillars of brand equity (e.g., meaningfulness) may become more important than others (e.g., salience) (Fournier and Alvarez 2019). A revenue premium–based approach to assessing brand equity can still help assess short-term brand value but might not adequately capture the extent to which some brands may be better connected with their customers than with other stakeholders.…”

Crossing Bridges: Assembling Culture into Brands and Brands into Consumers' Global Local Cultural Lives

“…This research dialogue presents two articles on how brands acquire cultural meanings (Fournier & Alvarez, —this issue; Batra, —this issue). Both Fournier and Alvarez and Batra comment on how cultural meanings are assembled into brands, often by brand managers, but also other cultural intermediaries, including consumers, and how consumers use brands as resources in their lives, attaching new and different meanings to brands.…”

Brands as personal narratives: learning from user–YouTube–brand interactions

“…For instance, brands are conceptualized as emotional things (Thomson et al 2005 ). Current views hold that brands: (a) are gestalts, and reflect an amalgamation of tangible and intangible value (Murphy 1992 ), (b) trigger emotions, convey meaning, and help consumers make sense of the world around them (Fournier and Alvarez 2019 ; Holt 2002 ; Keller 2003 ; Keller and Lehmann 2006 ), (c) are symbolic versus the entirely tangible and the literal (e.g., Aaker 1996 ; Aaker et al 2001 ). This attention to emotions and symbolic meanings of brands is apparent in research devoted to social media usage as well (e.g., Gielens and Steenkamp 2019 ; Hughes et al 2019 ; Tellis et al 2019 ; Torelli and Ahluwalia 2012 ).…”