Navigating the emergence of brand meaning in service ecosystems

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand's service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding.Design/methodology/approachCombining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena – like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning – manifest from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on Sawyer's (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence.FindingsOur framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: individual (e.g. employees and customers); interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact); relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet); strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances); and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task.Originality/valueService research has only recently embraced a macro–micro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by individual actors.

Dynamic brand positioning: a firm-customer synergistic strategy of brand meaning cocreation in a hyperconnected world

“…Furthermore, some scholars have noticed that brand meaning is no longer static due to the increased interaction between the brand and customers in the digital era (Hollenbeck et al , 2008; Iglesias and Bonet, 2012; Swaminathan et al , 2020). Therefore, the dynamic capability of a firm has an important impact on brand meaning cocreation (Baker et al , 2022; Brodie et al , 2017; Choi et al , 2016; Iglesias et al , 2019; Vallaster and Von Wallpach, 2013); that is, the narrowing of the difference in brand meaning perception between the firm and the customer is the driving force for brand meaning cocreation (Brodie et al , 2017; Fournier and Alvarez, 2019; Iglesias et al , 2019). However, there is no further study on how and to what extent firms and customers can affect the diversity and consistency of brand meaning perception, let alone on how changes in the brand meaning perception gap affect the evolution of brand positioning.…”

“…Thus, brand association is congruent, defined as the extent to which a brand association shares content and meaning with another association (Keller, 1993). Extant research on brand positioning considers How brand meaning is cocreated (Brodie et al, 2017;Fournier and Alvarez, 2019;Iglesias et al, 2019) Lack of research on the role and effect of the cocreated brand meaning Brand meaning gaps exist, and its dynamics are led by brand touch points changing (Berthon et al, 2009;Iglesias and Bonet, 2012) It only emphasizes the gaps in brand meaning perception between employees, firms and customers, not focusing on the effect of the gaps The crucial role of brand cocreation in guiding employees' brand promise delivery (Dean et al, 2016) Not exploring how brand meaning is negotiated in social interactions Brand meaning results from simultaneous interactions (Baker et al, 2022;Choi et al, 2016;Vallaster and Von Wallpach, 2013) Lack of research on the role and participation degree of firms and customers in the interaction How shared and stable brand meaning is generated (Eckhardt et al, 2015) Only the consistency of brand meaning perception is considered, but lack of discussion of the diversity Branding as a dynamic capability enables an actor to facilitate meaning creation (Brodie et al, 2017;Iglesias et al, 2019) Although the relationship between dynamic capability and brand meaning creation is discussed, the role and influence of cocreating meaning are not discussed How cocreated brand meaning evolve (Tierney et al, 2016) The evolution of cooperative brand meaning is only discussed from the interaction perspective but lacks a further discussion on the role and consequence of brand meaning evolution EJM 56,10 competitors' differences and external market environment factors, but given the long-term nature of the strategy, research on the evolution and approach of brand positioning in marketing management is lacking.…”