Volume Introduction: New Perspectives and Future Research Issues on Brand Meaning Management

Establishing, expanding, protecting, leveraging, and revitalizing brand meaning are critically important yet exceedingly complex issues. On the one hand, successful brand meaning management is foundational to both brand differentiation and to establishing strong and enduring brand-customer relationships. Strong brand relationships are grounded in strong brand attachment, brand love, and brand engagement. Such grounding can drive important outcomes to firms, like brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and consumers’ motivations to join forces with others in establishing brand communities. In turn, these outcomes can enhance market share, brand profitability, brand equity, brand growth, and shareholder value (see Figure).

On the other hand, managing this meaning over time is complex, dynamic, and multi-determined. Moving from the point of establishing brand meaning to expanding its meaning, protecting it, and revitalizing it when necessary is influenced by meaning makers from within as well as outside the firm. Within the firm, a given brand’s meaning may emanate from marketing communications, yet this fundamental meaning is often grounded in and sometimes constrained the set of brands that comprise the company’s brand architecture. Moreover, influences on brand meaning management reside not just within the firm but also with other meaning makers such as consumers, competitors, celebrities, and regulators. Some meaning makers are favorably disposed to the brand (brand champions); others are not (brand detractors). Moreover, meaning makers from both inside and outside the firm can use social media to impact thousands at once. Brands with strong brand meanings are also subject to counterfeit brands that can either highjack/threaten or even bolster brand meaning. So too must firms be vigilant in protecting and/or recovering from brand transgressions that might threaten the meaning they have carefully cultivated with consumers. Managing these complex and interacting forces so as to prevent dilution or distortion of brand meaning is thus critical.