Although the relationship metaphor dominates contemporary marketing thought and practice, surprisingly little empirical work has been conducted on relational phenomena in the consumer products domain, particularly at the level of the brand. In this article, the author: (1) argues for the validity of the relationship proposition in the consumer-brand context, including a debate as to the legitimacy of the brand as an active relationship partner and empirical support for the phenomenological significance of consumer-brand bonds; (2) provides a framework for characterizing and better understanding the types of relationships consumers form with brands; and (3) inducts from the data the concept of brand relationship quality, a diagnostic tool for conceptualizing and evaluating relationship strength. Three in-depth case studies inform this agenda, their interpretation guided by an integrative review of the literature on person-to-person relationships. Insights offered through application of inducted concepts to two relevant research domains — brand loyalty and brand personality — are advanced in closing. The exercise is intended to urge fellow researchers to refine, test, and augment the working hypotheses suggested herein and to progress toward these goals with confidence in the validity of the relationship premise at the level of consumers’ lived experiences with their brands.

Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research

Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339922

Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding

In this article, we elaborate on various key ideas about consumption and consumer from a theoretical position that we have labeled "liberatory postmodernism." By unmasking the limitations of modernism that have to do with the onerous nature of its metanarratives and narrow conventionalism, we show that postmodern developments offer alternate visions of consumption processes that have an emancipatory potential. The analysis in our article begins with a discussion of the philosophical foundations of modernism and postmodernism followed by a cultural critique of modernism-exposing, for example, the modernist distinction between production and consumption and the privileging of production over consumption. We demonstrate how postmodernism is concerned with the reversing of the conditions of modernity and with a wide range of issues regarding the construction of the subject (i.e., the consumer), the role of the symbolic in consumption processes, the notion of the spectacularization of life, the creation of the hyperreal, and the cultural signification of fragmentation. We conclude the article with a proposal for an epistemology of consumption that subsumes scientific knowledge under a broader category of narrative knowledge and recognizes multivocality of consumption forms.

Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption

The Structure of Solid Surfaces and Adsorbate Overlayers. Adsorption I: The Binding of Molecules to Surfaces. Adsorption II: Adsorption Isotherms. Adsorption III: Kinetics of Adsorption. Introduction to Surface Reactions. Rate Laws for Reactions on Surfaces I: Kinetic Models. A Review of Reaction--Rate Theory. Models of Potential Energy Surfaces: Reactions as Curve Crossings and Electron Transfer Processes. Rates and Mechanisms of Surface Reactions. Index.

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Principles of Adsorption and Reaction on Solid Surfaces

Although consumer demand for authentic market offerings has often been mentioned in consumer research, the meaning of the term “authentic” has not been sufficiently specified. Thus, some important differences among authentic market offerings have not been recognized or examined. This article uses Peirce's semiotic framework to distinguish between two kinds of authenticity—indexical and iconic. We identify the cues that lead to the assessment of each kind, and, based on data collected at two tourist attractions, we show that these cues can have a different influence on the benefits of consuming authenticity. Our results also contribute to an understanding of the negotiation of reality and fantasy as a part of consumption.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/422109

Consumer Perceptions of Iconicity and Indexicality and Their Influence on Assessments of Authentic Market Offerings

This author aims to show how corporate symbols or signs vie for attention and market share by appropriating - and quickly abandoning - diverse elements of culture to differentiate products that may in themselves be virtually indistinguishable.

Sign wars : the cluttered landscape of advertising

Suddenly the Swoosh Is Everywhere Just Metacommunicate It Nike and the Construction of a Celebrity Democracy Reflexivity and Irreverence Alienation, Hope and Transcendence Determinism or Determination? Transcending Difference? Representing Women in Nike's World There Are Many Paths to Heaven "Just Do It," but Not on "My Planet"

Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh

This article explores the contradictory cultural tendencies at play in the political economy of corporate brand values.Corporate brand values often serve mutually contradictory goals of capital accumulation and legitimation.Though competitive branding aims at distinguishing firms from one another, in the overall landscape of branding, the semiotics of branding contributes to tightly condensed, yet overarching, capitalist metanarratives.What additional contradictions evolve out of a branding process that indiscriminately mines culture for the purpose of boosting brand values?

Stephen Papson

Papers

Sign wars : the cluttered landscape of advertising

Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh

Capital's brandscapes

Advertising in the Age of Hypersignification

Spuriousness and tourism: Politics of Two Canadian Provincial Government