Abstract Executives consistently rank brand reputation risk among the top three overall risk challenges facing their businesses. This risk is the possible damage to a brand’s overall standing, stature and esteem that derives from negative signals regarding the brand. Successful brand stewardship requires ongoing tracking and monitoring of four marketing-strategy-related sources of reputational risks to brands: brand architecture strategies, digital marketing strategies, person-brand strategies and corporate socio-political activism. The authors provide ideas for metrics that a dashboard to manage brand reputation risk might contain. From the analysis of monitoring data, brands can, among other things, assess the level of severity of a specific brand reputation risk issue, the frequency of certain types of events, alternate response scenarios and the effectiveness of their actions.

This article proposes a novel theory, based on relational paradoxes, to explain how consumers enable or disable their relationships with brands over time. Analysis of data from in-depth, longitudinal interviews with 26 consumers reveals four relational tensions and seven actions that consumers take in response to these tensions, thus affecting the course and character of their brand relationships. Four consumer actions enable the consumer–brand relationship by creating patterns of relationship change based on equilibrium or transformation; three actions disable the relationship via patterns of vicious cycles or conflict. Overall, consumers do relationship work as they act to navigate tensions, thereby creating, maintaining, changing, and terminating their brand relationships. This research has implications for current theory on brand relationship templates, dysfunctional brand relationships, and customer relationship management.

Abstract Employment practices, civic responsibilities, philanthropy, environmental stewardship, the conduct of corporate executives and employees, the execution of marketing campaigns: All these topics can trigger brand risk events. The challenging branding environment calls for reimagining classic brand marketing through a refreshed and updated social risk management lens. Companies need to assess which socio-economic marketing opportunities can renew brand resonance. This involves not just identifying revenue generating opportunities, but also identifying, cataloging, and tracking SEP risk types in order for managers to understand the new landscape brands must now navigate. Then, they need to implement a framework to manage a brand’s social risks and to take advantage of potential opportunities. Fully embracing this responsibility changes the marketing executive’s role in a significant way: From top line revenue generation to a dual role that includes managing risks as well as returns.

This article provides insight into the management of brands that are also people by unpacking the interdependencies that exist between people and brands and focusing on the qualities that make person-brands human rather than on the qualities that make them brands. Using the extended case method to examine 20 years of public data about the Martha Stewart brand, the authors highlight the interdependent relationship between the person and the brand—in particular, consistency and balance—and identify four aspects of the person that can upset these interdependencies: mortality, hubris, unpredictability, and social embeddedness. Mortality and hubris can cause imbalance, but with the right skills and structures, these factors can be proactively managed. Inconsistency in the meanings of the person versus the brand can derive from the person’s unpredictability and social embeddedness and compromise brand value, but it may also enhance brand value by adding needed intimacy and authenticity. This two-bodied conceptualization suggests renewed management principles and contributes to branding theory through identification of the doppelgänger within, new brand strength facets, and emphasis on risk versus returns.

This article endeavors to advance research on the cultural resonance of brands by building bridges between branding scholarship in the consumer psychology tradition and interpretive research regarding brands and their meaning makers. We adopt a cognitivist conceptualization of cultural meaning and focus on the application of interpretive insights to well‐established constructs in the consumer psychology of brands: brand associations, product category associations, social identity, and self‐identity. This integrative exercise highlights the value of cultural models in explaining the processes whereby brands acquire meaning, and suggests several themes that are under‐valued when considering this process problem through a psychological lens: the motivational underpinnings of myths and other cultural meaning models, the relative value of shared cultural and brand meanings versus idiosyncratic meanings, the power and primacy of category‐level meaning making over brand‐level meaning making, the complex processes whereby brands gain and lose legitimacy, and the influence of lay theories about brands and branding on how consumers co‐create meaning for brands.

The physical and social realities, mental biases and limitations of being human differentiate human brands from others. It is their very humanness that introduces risk while generating the ability for enhanced returns. Four particular human characteristics can create imbalance or inconsistency between the person and the brand: mortality, hubris, unpredictability and social embeddedness. None of these qualities manifest in traditional non-human brands, and all of them present risks requiring active managerial attention. Rather than treating humans as brands and making humans into brands for sale in the commercial marketplace, our framework forces a focus on keeping a balance between the person and the personified object.

Like a stock portfolio, each relationship type offers a brand higher or lower growth opportunities and risks. The type of relationship is particularly relevant in brand crisis events. When a brand is hit by a crisis, it is not necessarily the most successful strategy to focus exclusively on protecting positive emotional relationships. At-risk relationships are affected more than others and can lead to a significant decline of brand value.

Whether it be the NFL, Dove, Wells Fargo, VW or countless others–managers need only open a daily newspaper to see how things can go terribly wrong for brands. Decline can be fast and the landing hard. In a contemporary marketplace where ideologies reign and social media guarantees the spread of (mis)information at light speed, a lot of what we think we know about brand marketing needs to be rethought through a risk-management lens. “For me, brand risk is any event, action or condition with the potential to damage a brand’s value, thereby making revenue generation and a company’s market value less than it should or could have been,” Patrick Marrinan, Managing Principal of Marketing Scenario Analytica, states. In his talk with Susan Fournier and Shuba Srinivasan, Patrick illustrates the many facets of a risk that has only begun to be recognized as a serious threat to carefully cultivated brand assets. Here we share what to watch out for and what brands can do to protect against risk.

Abstract In an increasingly risky socioeconomic environment, management needs to proactively consider brand-related risks. To understand brands as tools for risk management, they need to understand four types of brand risk: brand reputation risk, brand dilution risk, brand cannibalization risk and brand stretch risk. Risk management is not a natural act for brand managers trained in astute execution of the 4 Ps, and contemporary market factors make this more challenging still. With an increasingly polarized society, it is almost impossible for brands to remain untouched by ideologies. In addition, the growth in digital advertising gives brand managers less control over advertising placement and context, and the mandate to keep growing adds executional risk. The more exposed a brand is to brand risk, the more attention this topic will need in the boardroom. To shift a company’s marketing philosophy toward risk, it is important to define marketing competences in a broader way, to be self-critical and to be proactive.

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This chapter reviews current research on how consumers' attitudes toward brands are shaped in order to gain a more informed understanding of consumer-brand dynamics for marketing practitioners and academics. It explores characteristics of both brands and consumers, cognitive science concerning how consumers process brand information, and the medium of brand information. Brand personality affects the brand associations that provide the basis for consumers' attitudes toward brands. Advertising is an important driver of how consumers process brand information. When advertising promotes self-association, consumers have more positive implicit attitudes, self-reported attitudes, and greater purchase intentions. Most research on consumers' psychological connections with brands focuses on positive attitudes and drivers of attitude strength. Limited work explores the negative valence dimension, and most of this focuses on mitigating or changing negative attitudes, leaving the understanding of the nature, causes, and outcomes of negative brand attitudes underdeveloped.

Despite evidence suggesting a growing incidence of brand architecture strategies beyond the branded house (e.g., Boeing and IBM) and house-of-brands (e.g., P&G with Tide and Cheer), and recognition that in practice these strategies are very different, there is still a need for research on how financial markets value the full range of brand architecture strategies pursued by firms. We replicate and extend Rao et al.'s (Journal of Marketing, 68(4), 126-141, 2004) investigation of brand portfolio strategy and firm performance by (1) adding sub-branding and endorsed branding architectures, (2) clarifying the "mixed" architecture to constitute a BH-HOB hybrid and remove sub-and endorsed branding variants, and (3) quantifying the impact of a company's brand architecture strategy on stock risk in addition to returns. To explore the risk profiles of these five different strategies, we offer a brand-relevant conceptualization of the sources of idiosyncratic risk that may be exacerbated or controlled through brand architecture strategy: brand reputation risk, brand dilution risk, brand cannibalization risk, and brand stretch risk. We demonstrate superior results in terms of model performance using the expanded five-part architecture categorization and conclude with implications for practice. Our results show that risk/return tradeoffs for sub-branding, endorsed branding, and the BH-HOB hybrid differ significantly from what common wisdom suggests.

Contemporary research on consumer-brand bonds has moved beyond founding notions of loyalty and commitment and the marriage metaphor that encompasses them to explore diversity in brand relationships and the rules that govern them. Research shows that strong, positive relationships are less frequent than anticipated and that all brand relationships carry risks - for consumers and for brands. On the brand side of the relationship equation, anthropomorphism has emerged as a key condition for processes governing human interactions to transfer to brands. On the person side, attachment styles affect brand relationships through compensatory, self-signaling, and assimilative mechanisms. Future research informs pointed critiques about brand relationships and the dynamics that govern their development.

Consumer self-presentation is considered a major driver of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. In particular, the manner in which consumers self-present using brand mentions is likely to impact impressions of the WOM senders as well as the mentioned brands. In some cases, however, mentioning reputable brands in a WOM message can be considered bragging, which can lead to negative impressions of the communicator. In this chapter, we use Twitter data to develop a typology of different strategies consumers use to mention brands while crafting positive self-presentations on social media. Our findings suggest that consumers try to avoid negative evaluations while bragging via brand mentions by (1) mentioning brands in the context of sharing on social media what one is doing, feeling or thinking at the moment, (2) shifting the focus of communication away from the self, and/or (3) downplaying one’s own or the brand’s positive characteristics. These brand mentioning strategies map onto some common tactics used by marketers to encourage consumers to talk about brands on social media. Our typology of brand mentioning strategies is a first step towards examining the downstream consequences of these strategies for the communicator and the mentioned brand. Moreover, our typology can help in developing a theory to guide practitioners in selecting tactics to encourage brand mentions that will benefit the brand.

Volumes such as this typically conclude with a wrap-up chapter from the editors that compiles reflections on the included works. We wanted to take a different tack: something that could perhaps deliver better on the goals of capturing stateof-the-art thinking and motivating future branding practice and research. So, we went beyond the editor team and approached some of the brightest and best researchers in our domain–people with foundational contributions to branding–and asked them for help. Each of the thought leaders represented in this chapter was asked to reflect on the future of branding and identify one issue that they found critical to the advance of branding theory and practice. Contributors were encouraged to dig deep and consider the things we are doing well in brand research, the theories and frameworks we are getting wrong, research lenses that are under-or over-utilized, assumptions that should be challenged, forces on the brand landscape in need of exploration, and lost or less-appreciated insights that deserve to be revisited–from within our own disciplines and elsewhere. Four broad themes emerge in these mini-essays. The result is an extensive and dynamic collection of thoughts that encourages the reader to shake loose the dust that has settled on our thinking about the very essence of brands. With these words as inspiration, we can envision a new frontier of research made possible by both evolving technologies and the work of these thought leaders themselves.

Strengthening our understanding of the importance of brands to consumers, firms, and society at large

Theory and research on consumer-brand relationships has grown significantly since the seminal publications in the 1990s (Fournier 1994; 1998), but this growing interest and expanding literature has occurred mainly in the academic community. Despite the rich insights afforded by core concepts in this work, scalable, practical applications have followed, but adoption by practitioners has lagged.