Brand Management: Research, theory and practice

Life stories often reveal themselves as undercurrents in phenomenological depth
interviews. Allowing the respondent to talk for hours will hence often disclose
important and recurring themes and values linked with their life history (often
the life themes, life projects and current concerns of relationship theory are
relevant, when understanding the nature of relationships). Linking these themes
with statements about other subjects can deepen the understanding of the whole
life of the respondent.

Box 8.4 Depth is preferred to breadth

As described in box 8.2, only three informants served as basis of the original

brand relationship research in order to secure depth: ‘Size restrictions on the

informant pool ensured the depth concerning life worlds and brand rela-

tionship portfolios necessary for thick description’ (p. 347). Each

respondent was interviewed for twelve to fifteen hours and the interviews

were designed to complement the first-person descriptions of the brand use

with the contextual details of the informants’ life worlds: ‘To stimulate

discussion, kitchen cabinets were opened and informants were instructed to

‘tell the story’ behind any brand in the inventory’ (Fournier 1998, p. 347).

The life-story information is gathered at a closing interview. The

research design had two purposes: ‘Interviews were designed to yield two

complementary types of information: (1) a first-person description of the

informant’s brand usage history and (2) contextual details concerning the

informant’s life world’ (p. 347).

SourceFournier (1998)

The relational approach 167

Box 8.5 Stories can be helped along

Consumers’ unstructured stories about brand consumption can be helped

along by the use of images. In a phenomenological study of coffee

consumption ‘informant-generated’ images were used to stimulate stories of

brand use. Ten days before the interviews were to take place the respondents

were asked to collect a set of images describing ‘how they felt about coffee’

(coffee category images) and another set of images capturing their feelings

towards their favourite coffee brand.

The interviews (of two to three or five hours) were then structured in

three parts:

• Part one centred on the coffee category images. (How do respondents
  feel about coffee in general?) Central images were identified and
  laddering techniques were applied, meaning that the interviewee kept