It was a red-letter day in the history of marketing. On April 23, 1985, the Coca-Cola Company announced that a new and sweeter Coke would take the place of the famous soft drink that had been created in Atlanta a century earlier. The rest of the story is well known. The initial fanfare quickly turned into a brouhaha, as consumers rejected the new concoction en masse.
As a result, just three months later, the old formula was back in the bottle under the brand name Classic Coke, leaving New Coke a minuscule part of the company's product mix. What Coca-Cola executives had forgotten was the lesson enunciated, with some hyperbole, by one newspaper editor many years before: "Coca-Cola is the sublimated essence of all that America stands for." In other words, for millions of people in this country and abroad, Coke was a lot more than just a beverage with a certain color and level of sweetness. It was a brand that played an important part in their emotional lives.
The applicability of that journalist's observation to a broad range of goods—many of them as mundane as tomato paste and detergent rather than logoed designer clothes and prestigious luxury cars—has now been substantiated by much more than mere anecdote. Five years of research by HBS assistant professor Susan Fournier has shed new light on the multifaceted significance of the relationships between consumers and the brands they purchase.
"The analysis suggests that the people in this series of studies are not just buying brands because they like them or because they work well," observes Fournier. "They are having relationships with a collection of brands so as to benefit from the meanings these products add to their lives. Some of these meanings are functional and utilitarian; others are more psychosocial and emotional," she continues. "All, however, are ego-centered and therefore of great significance to the individuals engaged in them."
In hundreds of lengthy interviews, Fournier has examined the life stories of her subjects, focusing attention, she points out, on the "whole person, since the understanding of given brand relationships requires deep understanding of the 'life world' of the person being questioned." Beyond asking informants about such matters as family background and job status, Fournier also seeks to learn about their defining decisions, major experiences, and key transition points. And rather than concentrate on one item they use, she collects extensive and longitudinal information—brand histories—on the broader portfolio of products in the consumer's brand repertoire.
The result is a set of comprehensive data regarding consumers and brands that goes far beyond the focus on brand loyalty as typically measured on a five-point scale of repurchase likelihood. "In real life," Fournier commented in the Harvard Business Review, "people relate to one another in many different ways. The same is true as to how they relate to the brands they buy. To reduce it simply to a matter of loyalty or lack of loyalty is like saying that you either marry everybody you meet or they will never be a meaningful part of your life."
To counteract this tendency, Fournier has created a typology of fifteen different types of relationships between consumers and their brands. They include the "secret affair" (one woman Fournier interviewed stashed a favorite kind of candy in her desk for a special treat), "best friendship" (a consumer likes a certain hotel so much that she regards it as an essential part of both her personal and professional life), and "kinship" (you buy a certain make of automobile because your parents owned one). Other relationships in Fournier's schema go by rubrics such as "fling" (a short-term engagement with something like a trial-size shampoo), "courtship" (testing a brand before entering into a long-term "committed partnership"), and "marriage of convenience" (devotion to a product first encountered by chance).
Fournier is quick to point out that all brand relationships are subject to change because of personal, environmental, and managerial factors. "Relationships are evolutional phenomena," she asserts, "and as such they proceed through cycles of initiation, growth, maintenance, and deterioration." This is an especially important consideration for marketers, Fournier continues, "because, arguably, the overarching goal of marketing, from initiating loyalty programs to changing formulas to revamping advertising tag lines, is to positively affect the shape of the relationship development curve—namely, to encourage consumer-brand bonds that are maintained indefinitely and at high levels of intensity through time."
To enable executives to conceptualize and evaluate the strength of the consumer-brand relationship, Fournier has also developed a diagnostic instrument homing in on what she calls "brand relationship quality" (BRQ). Consisting of several dimensions besides brand loyalty, BRQ screens for six other important attributes, including interdependence (according to Fournier, "the degree to which the brand is ingrained in the consumer's daily life"), self-concept connection ("the degree to which the brand delivers on concerns, tasks, or themes important to a person's identity"), and love/passion (indicating a strong emotional bond with a product, even to the point where it is regarded as irreplaceable or addictive).
Using this approach, Fournier argues, managers can "maximize marketplace performance by paying attention to undervalued and overlooked relationship forms. A rationale can be formulated for determining why each consumer-brand relationship can be of interest to the marketer and, importantly, how each should be managed differently according to the unique qualities of the consumer-brand bond."
With brands continuing to be a powerful force in the market-place (earlier reports of their demise having been greatly exaggerated), Fournier's work provides new insights and perspectives for both executives and academics. "As relational, one-to-one marketing replaces mass marketing as the dominant model," she concludes, "the concept of brand-person relationships provides fertile ground for further research. Our understanding is enhanced greatly by moving from loyalty alone to the broader notion of a relationship framework that encompasses it."
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