Author:
Fuschillo Gregorio,Cayla Julien,Cova Bernard
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct their lives.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors followed five brand devotees over several years, using various data collection methods (long interviews, observations, videos, photographs and secondary data) to study how they reconstructed their lives with a brand.
Findings
Consumers transform their existence through a distinctive form of brand appropriation that the authors call brand magnification, which unfolds: materially, narratively and socially. First, brand devotees scatter brand incarnations around themselves to remain in touch with the brand because the brand has become an especially positive dimension of their lives. Second, brand devotees mobilize the brand to craft a completely new life story. Finally, they build a branded clan of family and friends that socially validates their reconstructed identity.
Research limitations/implications
The research extends more muted depictions of brands as soothing balms calming consumer anxieties; the authors document the mechanism through which consumers remake their lives with a brand.
Practical implications
The research helps rehabilitate the role of brands in contemporary consumer culture. Organizations can use the findings to help stimulate and engage employees by unveiling the brand’s life-transforming potential for consumers.
Originality/value
The authors characterize a distinctive, extreme and unique form of brand appropriation that positively transforms consumer lives.
Reference80 articles.
1. Service-dominant logic and consumer culture theory: natural allies in an emerging paradigm,2007
2. Market-oriented ethnography: interpretation building and marketing strategy formulation;Journal of Marketing Research,1994
3. Brand love: development and validation of a practical scale;Marketing Letters,2017
4. The bounce in our steps from shared material resources in cultural trauma and recovery;Journal of the Association for Consumer Research,2016
5. Brand love;Journal of Marketing,2012
Cited by
7 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献