Consumer Brand Relationships (Essay Sample)

Consumer Brand Relationships
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Critique to Article Consumer Brand Relationships
Introduction
Companies invest in promotion of their brands to generate credibility among the consumers. One of the purposes of this action is that clients feel credibility towards the brand, and products purchase can be influenced in greater degree. In this way, firms should optimize the use of their resources in such a way they capture consumer’s attention, and thus influence the intention of acquisition of goods or services successfully.
Contributions of the Article
The article “Consumer Brand Relationships: An Investigation of Two Alternative Models”, presents important contributions to the study of brand loyalty in marketing management. The research is useful because loyalty is an attitude of consumers related to the repurchase of products, based on an understanding of behavior dynamics that are generated between consumers and companies with brands. Although the current role of social media in brand positioning is not taken into account (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2018). One of the main contributions of the article is providing the results of an empirical study of two models, BQR and RI that explain relationship between consumers and brands (Breivik & Thorbjørnsen, 2008). These models help to achieve a deeper knowledge of the customers, the markets, and the relationship of consumers with brands through different factors or dimensions.
Summary of the key theoretical arguments. According to the authors, the consumer's relationship with brands suggests that several factors are present, and they make it possible to understand this relationship. This theory resembles a metaphor, such as marriage, that implies the existence of commitment, interdependence, love, and sharing a common home (Breivik & Thorbjørnsen, 2008). The above situation is known as a relationship metaphor between consumers and brands. In this way, aspects such as needs and expectations of consumers are identified and studied in greater depth, for which, to gain a deeper understanding of consumer relationships with brands, the authors used the BQR and RI models.
The BQR model is the measurement of the strength and depth of the consumer's relationship with the brand. This model has several dimensions: love/passion, self-connection with the product, commitment, interdependence, intimacy, and quality as a brand. It could be interesting to investigate how other dimensions related to brand experience work: sensory, affective, behavioral, and intellectual (Japutra & Molinillo, 2017). The model BQR presents the difficulty of integrating all the dimensions mentioned in a coherent structure. That is, it lacks an internal relationship between its dimensions. Research has concluded that these types of relationships exist, and are important for marketing managers in the process of designing brand positioning strategies.
The RI model is an extension of the Model of Interdependence proposed by Kelley and Thibaut in 1978. This model emphasizes two sources of dependence: satisfaction with the brand and quality of alternative brands (Breivik & Thorbjørnsen, 2008). In this model, the level of satisfaction with a brand is the sum of positive aspects against negative effects, and also it depends on the performance of other brands of the competition. This model contains four dimensions: commitment, satisfaction, quality of the alternatives, and size of the investment made to offer the products to the market. As noted, both models can be complementary to identify how strong the relationship between the consumer and the brand is.
Results, conclusion and integration. Through the research, the authors determined that the BRQ and BI models present difficulties to verify with empirical tests the relational ties between consumers and brands. For this situation, the researchers propose an alternative model based on the RI, one that allows to explore direct or indirect routes from the sources of dependence between brands and consumers. With this alternative, different cases that involve a less intense relationship between brands and consumers can be studied.
The authors suggest that the RI model has some notable advantages over the BRQ model. One of them is that the RI model works on concepts that are properly established in marketing, and have been tested for a long time. From the investigations conducted to determine the performance of the different models, it was concluded that the BRQ model has limitations to explain the possible causes in case of weak relationships between brands and consumers. Another problematic aspect of this model is the limited capacity to integrate and relate to each other within its different dimensions. Another area of work not addressed in the article and important for brand managers is how the dimensions of commitment, self-connection, intimacy, loyalty, and passion affect the mass consumption of luxury brands (Nobre & Simoes, 2019). For its part, the RI model has greater capacity to interpret strong and weak relationships between brands and consumers. It is also suitable to identify the vulnerability of a brand by the appearance of new competitors or changes in existing competing products.
Despite the interesting contributions that the article offers in the relationship between consumers and brands, it can be considered outdated, given that it was prepared in 2008 and takes information from the early 1990s. For example, actually Consumer/Customer-Based Brand Equity Model (CBBE) is a field of research because familiarity and image are prominent components explaining loyalty in brand relationship (Tasci, 2018). The CBBE model is also important to know brand building, brand understanding, and brand relationship patterns in international brand management (Chatzipanagiotou, Christodoulides & Veloutsou, 2019). Back then Internet and social networks did not have the apogee that they have today, when companies are actively using these two tools to publicize their products in broader markets. Other recent technological developments, not addressed by the authors of the article, such as augmented reality show an interesting potential in purchases through mobile devices thatcan create “more meaningful consumer-brand relationships” (Scholz & Duffy, 2018). This situation indicates that it is necessary to work on new theories about brand relations with the use of Internet and social networks for promotion of products and the importance of examining the consumer-brand relationships.
Evaluation of Articles on the Subject. Gomez, Lopez & Molina in a study called “An Integrated Model of Social Media Brand Engagement”, investigated the relationship between consumers and brands through social networks. One of their conclusions is that this type of analysis is still very incipient. Therefore, companies should explore even more how to manage the tools of social networks. The authors illustrate the example of European airlines that have positively improved relations, communications, and customer loyalty through an active use of social networks, such as Facebook (Gomez, Lopez & Molina, 2019). In this social network, for example, customers spend more time writing comments about their shopping experience with the airlines, which in turn helps to strengthen ties between clients and the company. This example is also corroborated in other studies, which found that consumers engaged in social media develop attitudes of trust and loyalty towards brands (Coelho, Rita & Raposo, 2018). It may be equally important to establish what gender behavior is like in this social network with respect to the brand relationship (Machado et al., 2019). One recommendation of the authors is that brand managers can significantly improve the effectiveness of brand loyalty by strengthening communications through social n