feeling of sharing the same important values stemming from the same family back-
ground. You might have a best friend from your kindergarten days. But you also have
relationships to fellow students and colleagues knowing that you will only uphold the
majority of these relationships in the period of time where you share the same
working or university sphere. Long or short, deep or shallow – relationships are
instrumental parts of everyone’s lives, structuring meaning and adding life content.
Research has proved that consumers experience relationships with brands
(Fournier 1998), and just like human relationships, consumer–brand relationships
are of a very diverse nature. Brand relationship theory reached a wide brand
management audience when ‘Consumers and their brands: developing rela-
tionship theory in consumer research’ by Susan Fournier was published in Journal
of Consumer Research(March of 1998).^4 Drawing on theories about human rela-
tionships and the idea of brand personality, the study went on to investigate the
marketing ‘buzz word’ at the time; relationships.
Brand relationship theory is also a continuation of theory about brand loyalty.
Loyalty is often closely linked with the sensation of a relationship. Loyal consumers
are valuable consumers. Creating brand loyalty is all about managing the
brand–consumer exchange long-term instead of a short-term exchange focusing on
the transaction. But while brand loyalty is an expression of ifa consumer chooses the
brand on a continuous basis, applying the brand relationship theory offers explana-
tions of howand whybrands are consumed by loyal consumers.
152 Seven brand approaches
Box 8.1 Customer relationship management and brand relationship
theory
The term ‘relationship marketing’ was first introduced in the literature on
services and then became an important notion in business-to-business
markets, where the business relationships often are longer than in business-
to-consumer markets. In the literature on services and relationships a
service encounter is defined as; ‘the dyadic interaction between a customer
and service provider’ (Bitner et al. 1990, p. 72).
Fournier’s aim was to establish a thorough framework for the use of this
metaphor and apply it to consumers’ brand relations; ‘In a sense, the field
has leapt ahead to application of relationship ideas and the assumption of
relationship benefits without proper development of the core construct
involved’ (Fournier 1998, p. 343).
Customer relationship management and brand relationship theory are
hence not necessarily the same. Customer relationship management offers
different tools to manage a customer relationship on a long-term basis
instead of focusing on the singular transaction while brand relationship
theory goes to the root of the relationship metaphor.
SourcesBitner et al. (1990) and Fournier (1998)