Consumer-Brand Relationships

In today’s highly competitive business environment brands and systematic brand management have become powerful means for differentiating a firm’s products in the eyes of consumers. Although being defined by marketing managers, brands ultimately evolve in the minds of consumers. A key challenge in this context is to understand how consumers perceive, evaluate, and relate to brands. This book deals with three different aspects of the interface between consumers and brands. It conceptually discusses and empirically examines the cognitive and emotional relationships consumers may form with brands, analyzes the transformation of an intended brand personality (i.e., intended by brand management) into a realized brand personality (i.e., perceived by consumers), and finally provides a more detailed understanding of how the interaction between the brand’s personality and the consumer’s personality affects brand performance. To adequately understand this interface between brand and consumer is certainly not only academically highly relevant but also crucial for managerial practice. Only if brand managers understand the effects of their branding activities on consumers’ perception and evaluation of the underlying brand, they can effectively design and efficiently implement branding strategies.