Consumers and Their Brands Developing Tribal Marketing

Marketing

Summary of Two Marketing Research Papers

Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research

The article by Fournier (1998) examined the way in which a relationship may exist between consumers and brands. The author argues that the concept of relationships have been underutilized in marketing research, with a lack of new research and most ideas focusing on the concept of loyalty; a concept which does not necessarily embody the idea of a relationship between the consumer and the brand. The aim of the research is to create framework from which the presence of a relationship may be assessed.

Fournier (1998) argues that the relationship concept is viable for assessing the way consumers perceive brands. The literature looks at the way firms have sought to humanize their brands, animating or endowing them with characteristics which may include a total anthropomorphization (such as the Pillsbury Dough boy) or creating association, or developing this though transfer and association, such as the use of well-known personalities as spokes people (such as Bill Cosby for Jello) (Fournier, 1998). These may create the emotions needed in the consumer to engage with a product to develop a relationship; however, there is inevitably a lack of reciprocity. The relationship is perceived as taking place in a psychological as well as socio-cultural context. The framework utilized is therefore based on relationship theories where there are a number of stages to the development of the relationship. Different models have different numbers of stages and will describe them, but they follow a similar pattern, such as the five phase model where the relationship will progress through initiation, growth, maintenance, deterioration and dissolution (Levinger, 1983, quoted Fournier, 1998).

Methodology

The methodology used a structured qualitative approach with three case studies undertaken on carefully selected women at different lifecycle stages; a married 59-year-old, a divorced 39-year-old and a 23-year-old graduate student (Fournier, 1998). Each of the women were interviewed over a three-month period with three to four in home interviews taking between 12 and 15 hours for each subject (Fournier, 1998). Women were chosen as the subjects due to former research indicating they are most likely to display strong brand relationships.

The data was analyzed based on verbatim transcripts using the concept of grounded theory (Fournier, 1998). Initially there was the use of an idiosyncratic approach to identify key issues and themes in each case (Fournier, 1998). This in-depth analysis was followed by a cross person analysis to identify the way patterns may be repeated across the subjects (Fournier, 1998).

Key Findings