The creation and management of customer relationships is fundamental to the practice of marketing. Marketers have long maintained a keen interest in relationships: what they are, why they are formed, what effects they have on consumers and the marketplace, how they can be measured and when and how they evolve and decline. While marketing research has a long tradition in the study of business relationships between manufacturers and suppliers and buyers and sellers, attention in the past decade has expanded to the relationships that form between consumers and their brands (such as products, stores, celebrities, companies or countries). The aim of this book is to advance knowledge about consumer-brand relationships by disseminating new research that pushes beyond theory, to applications and practical implications of brand relationships that businesses can apply to their own marketing strategies. With contributions from an impressive array of scholars from around the world, this volume will provide students and researchers with a useful launch pad for further research in this blossoming area.

From Patagonia to Apple, Whole Foods to New Balance, we love our favorite products--and, by extension, the companies that provide them. The emotional connections we form with our beloved brands and services are important relationships--relationships that are potentially worth billions. In the fast-paced, constantly-changing world of the modern marketplace, brands must adapt or perish—strategies, methods, and techniques must evolve to remain effective and relevant. Are you using yesterday’s thinking for tomorrow’s challenges? Brand Intimacy details ways to build better marketing through the cultivation of emotional connections between brand and consumer. The book provides lessons for marketers and business leaders alike who are seeking to understand these ultimate brand relationships and the opportunities they represent. Divided into three sections, Brand Intimacy starts with Context and Understanding. This explains today’s marketing landscape, the effects of technology, consumer behaviors and the advancements around decision making. Through research we discovered that people form relationships with brands the same way they develop relationships with other people. This section provides guidance on how to think about complimentary concepts such as loyalty, satisfaction and brand value. We then explore and compare established approaches and methodologies and showcase why intimacy is a compelling new and enhanced opportunity to build your brand or market your business. The second section, Theory and Model reveals and dimensions the brand intimacy model and dissects it into steps to help you better factor it into your marketing approaches or frameworks. Here you will learn the core concepts and components that are essential to build bonds and the role emotion can play to help you achieve greater customer engagement. You can also review the rankings of the best brands in terms of Brand Intimacy. A summary of our annual research reveals the characteristics of best performers, the most intimate industries, and differences based on geography, age, gender and income. By examining the top intimate brands, we reveal and decode the secrets of the bonds they form with their customers. The third section is Methods & Practice, this details the economic benefits and advantages of a strategy that factors Brand Intimacy. Intimate brands are proven to outperform the Fortune 500 and Standards and Poors’ index of brands. Intimate brands create more revenue and profit and last longer. Consumers are also willing to pay more for a brand they are more intimate with. Conversely, we also explore a series of brand failures and lessons learned to help you avoid common pitfalls in brand management. We articulate the steps to build a more intimate brand as well as share a glimpse on the future where software will play a more important role in brand building. The book outlines a proprietary digital platform that we use to help manage and enable intimacy through collaboration, simulators and real-time tracking of emotions. Business and marketing owners face an increasing difficult task to build brands that rise above the clutter, engage more and grow. Brand Intimacy explains how to better measure, build and manage enduring brands. Brands that are built to inspire as well as profit. Written by experienced marketers and backed by extensive research, Brand Intimacy rewrites the rulebook on how to establish and expand your marketing. The book is equal parts theory, research and practice, the result of 7 year journey and a new marketing paradigm for the modern marketer.

From the editor team of the ground-breaking Consumer-Brand Relationships: Theory and Practice comes this new volume. Strong Brands, Strong Relationships is a collection of innovative research and management insights that build upon the foundations of the first book, but takes the study of brand relationships outside of traditional realms by applying new theoretical frameworks and considering new contexts. The result is an expanded and better-informed account of people’s relationships with brands and a demonstration of the important and timely implications of this evolving sub-discipline. A range of different brand relationship environments are explored in the collection, including: online digital spaces, consumer collectives, global brands, luxury brands, branding in terrorist organizations, and the brand relationships of men and transient consumers. This book attends to relationship endings as well as their beginnings, providing a full life-cycle perspective. While the first volume focused on positive relationship benefits, this collection explores dysfunctional dynamics, adversarial and politically-charged relationships, and those that are harmful to well-being. Evocative constructs are leveraged, including secrets, betrayals, anthropomorphism, lying, infidelity, retaliation, and bereavement. The curated collection provides both a deeper theoretical understanding of brand relationship phenomena and ideas for practical application from experiments and execution in commercial practice. Strong Brands, Strong Relationships will be the perfect read for marketing faculty and graduate students interested in branding dynamics, as well as managers responsible for stewarding brands.

Brand relationships are critical because they can enhance company profitability by lowering customer acquisition and retention costs. This is the first serious academic book to offer a psychological perspective on the meaning of and basis for brand relationships, as well as their effects. "The Handbook of Brand Relationships" includes chapters by well-known marketing and psychology scholars on topics related to the meaning, significance, and measurement of brand relationships; the critical connections between consumers and the brand; how brand relationships are formed through both thoughtful and non-thoughtful processes; and how they are built, repaired, and leveraged through brand extensions. An integrative framework introduces the book and summarizes the chapters' key ideas. The handbook also identifies several novel metrics for measuring various aspects of brand relationships, and it includes recommendations for further research.

"This book focuses on the conception and marketing of luxury as an experience and explores more integrative and comprehensive approaches to modeling and understanding the consumer-brand relationship with luxury brands and their sustainability in a global and multicultural world"--

A young woman tells a focus group that Diet Coke is like her boyfriend. A twenty-something tattoos the logo of Turner Classic Movies onto his skin. These consumers aren’t just using these brands. They are engaging in a rich, complex, ever-changing relationship, and they’ll stay loyal, resisting marketing gimmicks from competitors and influencing others to try the brand they love. How can marketers cultivate and grow the deep relationships that earn this kind of love and drive lasting success for their brands? In Romancing the Brand, branding expert Tim Halloran reveals what it takes to make consumers fall in love with your brand. Step by step,he reveals how to start, grow, maintain, and troubleshoot a flourishing relationship between brand and consumer. Along the way, Halloran shares the secrets behind establishing a mutually beneficial “romance.” Drawing on exclusive, in-depth interviews with managers of some of the world’s most iconic brands, Romancing the Brand arms you with an arsenal of classic and emerging marketing tools—such as benefit laddering and word-of-mouth marketing—that make best-in-class brands so successful. The book is filled with examples, strategies, and tools from powerful brands that consumers love, including Coke, Dos Equis, smartwater, the Atlanta Falcons, Domino’s Pizza, Bounty, Turner Classic Movies, and many more. Ultimately, Romancing the Brand provides marketers with a set of principles for making brands strong, resilient, and beloved—and the insight and confidence to use them.

The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of various literatures related to consumer search for information, and its effect on markets. Normative models of consumer search prior to purchase, and of consumer search through experience, are reviewed first. Models of consumer consideration set formation are also outlined. These models are generally based on consumers balancing the costs and benefits of search, which implies that search should be limited if it is costly. The extensive empirical literature on consumer search, which is reviewed next, does indicate that search is limited. The third major section of this review discusses the effect of search on market equilibrium, and market forces related to the supply of information. These include models of how advertising, retailing, and the Internet become organized to facilitate consumer search. The review concludes with a discussion of overall findings and suggestions for further research.