approach features the dyadic brand–consumer relationship, the consumer seems to
be more the ‘owner’ of the brand than in the previous approaches.
The phenomenological perspective
Phenomenology is a penetrating research style that accesses an ‘inner reality’
through researching what is felt, perceived and thought. Phenomenology is
closely linked with the existentialism branch of philosophy. Here, the human
experience of key existential topics such as life, death and time is the basis for
understanding man.
Phenomenological research assumes a socially constructed reality as opposed
to the assumed external and objective reality of the positivist tradition. This is why
phenomenological research emphasizes ‘lived’ or ‘felt’ experience, which is also a
recurrent notion of the brand relationship theory.
In the relational approach, consumers are investigated as individuals and their
inner and idiosyncratic realities are considered valid. The relational approach is
meaning-based. Meaning is created in the interaction between sender and receiver
and is opposed to the concept of information which implies a notion of linear
communication from sender to receiver:
What matters in the construction of brand relationships is not simply what
managers intend for them, or what brand images ‘contain’ in the culture, but
what consumers do with brands to add meaning in their lives. The abstracted,
goal-derived, and experiential categories that consumers create for brands are
not necessarily the same as the categories imposed by the marketers in charge
of brand management.... This reality – that consumers’ experiences with
brands are often phenomenologically distinct from those assumed by the
managers who tend them – commands a different conception of brand at the
level of lived experience, and new, more complex approaches to the social
classification of branded goods.
(Fournier 1998, p. 367)The relational approach is concerned with understanding the identity projects of
consumers. It is important to notice that it is the individualidentity projects that are
investigated in this approach. The cultural approach (chapter 10) is concerned with
collectiveidentity projects. So the relational approach beats the drum for integrating
knowledge of individual identity projects in the management of a brand, while the
cultural approach does the same in favour of our collective identity projects.
Summary
The relational approach rests upon assumptions regarding the brand–consumer
exchange as a ‘dyadic’ and cyclical process resembling a human relationship.
Brand meaning is constituted through this process to which both parties contribute
equally. The relational approach is linked to the tradition of phenomenology
The relational approach 155