Student questions
1 Which psychological tradition is associated with the consumer-based approach?
2 What is the most important metaphor for man in this tradition?
3 The brand ‘ownership’ can be said to be of an ambiguous nature. Describe the
ambiguity.
and why consumers forge relationships with brands and form communities
with others; how culture is manifested in consumer consumption behaviour;
and how brands take on meaning that transcends physical products and
services and strict service specifications.
As a note of caution, it is important to notnarrowly view consumer-based
approaches in terms of just information processing models. Although such
models can be extremely useful to understand how consumers learn about
brands and how that knowledge, in turn, affects how they respond to any
aspect of marketing, researchers adopting a consumer-based approach to the
study of branding and brand management have successfully introduced or
adapted many other concepts related to non-cognitive issues and concerns.
The best consumer-based researchers recognize that branding and brand
management are an art and science and that the strongest brands have achieved
their success by being able to affect consumers both in their head and in their
heart. Like the best marketing practitioners, consumer-based researchers adopt
a broad view of how to think about consumers and strive to keep abreast of key
cultural trends that suggest new areas of consumer behavior to study.
In my own research I have found that focusing on consumer brand
knowledge structures provides a comprehensive, cohesive foundation for
analysis and a common denominator by which many different topics and
issues can be addressed. Fundamentally, the question becomes: how does
any marketing action or any other event or trend that occurs in the market-
place affect how consumers think, feel and act about brands? Defining
customer-based brand equity as the ‘differential effect that brand knowledge
has on how consumers respond to marketing activity’ has allowed me to
conceptualize sources and outcomes of brand equity in great detail and
provide specific managerial guidelines based on this conceptualization.
With a consumer-based approach, concepts, theories and findings from
diverse areas such as learning, memory, emotions, behavioural decision
theory, and consumer decision making – to name just a few – can all be
brought to bear to better understand how brands should be optimally built
and managed. With such dramatic changes in the marketing environment
due to increased globalization, technological advances, environmental
concerns and many other factors, the power of the consumer-based
approach to flexibly apply a variety of conceptual tools to address a variety
of managerial concerns in brand management is truly invaluable.The consumer-based approach 113