Brand Love is not Enough

A Theory of Consumer Brand Relationships in Practice

Max Blackston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351707312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

How would you feel about a bank that handled all of your financial needs efficiently, but made you feel like a dummy? In a relationship between two people, what the other person thinks of you (or what you believe they think of you) exerts great influence on the quality of your relationship. The same is true for your relationship with brands.

In this trailblazing book, Blackston extends his theory on consumer brand relationships introduced in the 1990s. He introduces a new construct called "brand ' s attitude, " which complements the idea of brand image and introduces a typology of consumer relationships that is richer and more varied than the familiar concept of brand love. This construct describes more fully the two-way street that exists between consumers and brands, and fills a crucial gap in traditional branding literature in explaining consumers' brand purchasing and usage behavior.

Drawing on numerous actual examples and cases from a variety of different industries, and supported by 30 years of consumer data, Brand Love is not Enough should be on the shelf of any serious marketer or student of branding.

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1

THE I-MAGE GAP

The basic question I am addressing in this book is: What makes a brand successful? Why do people buy a specific brand, rather than one of its competitors’ – or why do they buy that brand more often than the others? Let’s ask the question in a very specific way: What is it that gets people lining up for hours to part with not inconsiderable sums of money the day after the latest i-thing goes on sale? Aside from the unique product design features and performance, the wealth of available apps, music and other content, the ineffable Apple/Jobs appeal, and memorable Super Bowl ads, what else is it that they are buying?

There are obviously several answers to this question – or rather several types of answers; many of them concern the physical nature of the brand – the attributes of the product or service itself – or the classic marketing variables – price, packaging, distribution, advertising, net presence. These are usually the easy questions to answer. The harder-to-answer questions concern what is sometimes referred to as the “essence” of the brand itself – the essential “i-ness” of an i-thing; not its physical characteristics, not how it performs or delivers – but the i-ntangibles of the brand.

Traditionally, the intangibles have gone under various headings – brand image, brand personality, brand associations, etc. Nowadays, many people would add another heading – which we might term “viralness” – to summarize the presence and proactivity of the brand on the internet. For the moment we will group all these brand-related concepts under the convenient and familiar heading of “brand image.” At its very simplest, this may just consist of the answer to the question “do you like this brand?” Clearly this begs the question of why a consumer might like or dislike a brand, but none the less it ought to be a good starting point; if you are a brand manager, having people like your brand ought to be a good thing; the more consumers there are that like it, the more there will be that buy it; and the more that they like it, the more they should buy it – more frequently, more loyally. If only it was that simple; the problem is that this is – at best – only partially true. While people generally do not buy brands they don’t like, the opposite is not necessarily true; many people like brands they do not buy – and sometimes they like them a lot.

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In two recent studies conducted by my consulting firm – one in the USA and one in Mexico, together covering 128 brands in 20 different product categories – on average about one in four of the people who never use a brand say they “love it” or “like it a lot.” Liking or loving a brand may be a necessary condition for buying it, but it is not sufficient.

Even if we say that reducing brand image to the single dimension of liking or even loving the brand is an over-simplification, and that we have to consider a broader range of consumers’ perceptions of the brand, that does not solve the problem. Adding more of the same does not help; the same discontinuities between brand image and purchasing behavior can be found even when the former is measured in terms of a sophisticated and comprehensive array of brand image attributes and brand personality dimensions. A “strong” brand image – as we currently conceive it – may be a necessary condition for purchasing, but – by itself – it is insufficient to explain the kind of attachment to a brand that leads to purchasing – let alone the more committed behavior of repeated purchasing and brand loyalty. So is this the end of the story? Are we banging our heads up against the limitations of consumer science? Given that I ask such a question at the beginning of Chapter 1 of this book, the reader will rightly conclude that I do not believe so. Over the years that I have worked in marketing communications and consumer research, I have come to the conclusion that there is something beyond brand image – however widely defined – that can help us fill the gap. The new construct that I have identified and worked with, I call Brands’ Attitudes.

Brands’ Attitudes

The apostrophe in the term “brands’ attitudes” is important, because it distinguishes it from the term “brand attitude” (no apostrophe), a term which is often used by consumer scientists as a synonym for brand image. The latter is not a very precise term, because what is actually meant by it is consumers’ attitudes – toward the brand; but it is out there, and I have to deal with it. My term – brands’ attitude – on the other hand, describes exactly what it means; it describes consumers’ perceptions of brands’ beliefs, brands’ desires, brands’ intentions. A brand has an attitude inasmuch as the consumer ascribes intentionality to it, and the brand’s attitude is the consumer’s projection of the brand’s “self-awareness.” The fact that the two constructs – brand image and brands’ attitudes – are both consumer perceptions or projections does not mean that they are the same; everything that concerns us “lives” in the consumer’s mind, but what I am distinguishing are two separate dimensions of consumers’ perceptions which are very different in kind. The following real-life cases will serve to introduce the new construct of Brands’ Attitudes and to illustrate its importance.

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1. The American Express Card

The American Express brand of T&E (Travel and Entertainment) charge card was not the first in that category; that honor belongs to the Diners Card, which American Express effectively eclipsed. Nor did it have greater functionality than other “plastic” – the original lack of a revolving credit facility and the narrower range of outlets where it was accepted were vulnerabilities which its credit card competitors, such as Visa, were quick to exploit. The brand was successfully and purposively built on a prestige platform, by associating it with a variety of well-known people – among them prominent politicians and top sports and show-business celebrities. The “Do you know me?” advertising campaign, which played through the first half of the 1980s, has become one of the classics.

Figure 1.1 shows data from a mid 1990s brand image survey; at that time, American Express had nearly a three to one advantage, in terms of prestige, over all of its credit card competitors, and a substantial edge over Diners, its only T&E competitor.

FIGURE 1.1 Credit Cards’ Prestige Image

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FIGURE 1.2 Credit Card Use and Prestige Image

If prestige was the core element of the American Express brand image, that should mean that its far greater prestige would have won it more users – i.e. holders of the American Express Card – than other cards. However, Figure 1.2, showing the relationship between perceptions of prestige and card ownership from the same data set as Figure 1.1, seems to demonstrate almost exactly the opposite.

This is, of course, a case of “correlation without causation,” but it does at least raise a question about the relevance of prestige to the Amex image. The topic of prestige is the whole subject of Chapter 4; suffice it to point out here that prestige might be an ideal image platform for a brand targeted at an elite group – as was originally the case with the American Express Card. But it clearly has limitations when – as was the case from about the mid 1980s – Amex management had decided to build an Amex brand architecture in which the iconic Green Card, the standard-bearer of the brand, was tasked with becoming a mass-market offering. The resistance that the Green Card met to the expansion of its franchise made it look as though prestige was possibly an obstacle to the growth of the brand, rather than a platform that enabled it. Fortunately, before such a conclusion was reached, we looked at the relationship between card ownership and another set of perceptions – relating to the descriptor “Unapproachable.” This is shown in Figure 1.3.

Here it is clear that the more a credit card brand is seen as unapproachable the less likely it is to be used. This looked more like the real barrier that American Express had to overcome.

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FIGURE 1.3 Credit Card Use and Unapproachable Brand’s Attitude

The difference between prestigious and unapproachable is that prestigious is an attribute – presumably a desirable attribute – of the brand, whereas unapproachable is an attitude – presumably undesirable – of the brand; prestigious is a dimension of brand image – the consumer’s attitude toward the brand; unapproachable is something qualitatively different – it is a characteristic of the “brand’s attitude” toward the consumer. What does it mean to be unapproachable? Think about how you would characterize an unapproachable person; that person would tend to rebuff or resist contact with you, would give you the impression that they did not want to have anything to do with you, perhaps did not consider you sufficiently worthy to associate with. What if you thought that a credit card – particularly one that refers to its card holders as “members” – didn’t really want you as one of its holders? Would you go ahead and get it anyway because it is prestigious? Or would your attitude be “who needs prestige!”?

The problem for American Express – and for other brands that wish to appear prestigious – is that being prestigious and being unapproachable often do tend to go together. Figure 1.4 shows the relationship between these two perceptions for 48 US brands, from eight different product categories. The scales for both measures have been normalized in order to be able to compare their distributions; the axes intersect at the average point of each.

There is a weak positive correlation between the two – more prestigious brands do tend to be seen as more unapproachable – but the connection is by no means inevitable. Whereas all the brands in the top right-hand sector of the chart are above average on both prestige and unapproachable, the brands in the bottom right-hand sector are above average on prestige but below average for unapproachable. In fact, exactly half of the brands that are above average on prestige are below average on unapproachable.

What this means is that it is possible to be seen as prestigious without alienating potential users with an off-putting brand attitude – but it takes work. Crucially, it means t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Brand Love is Not Enough
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The I-mage Gap
• 2 The Relational Brand
• 3 Relationships with Packaged Goods Brands
• 4 Relationships with Prestige Brands
• 5 How Brand Relationships Mitigate Consumers’ Risk
• 6 Relationships with Corporate Brands
• 7 Universal Brand Relationships
• 8 Brand Relationships and the Value of Branded Businesses
• Appendix – Researching the Relational Brand
• Index