Psychological Ownership and the Emergence of Unintended Brand Meanings

In today’s highly inter-connected market environment, a holistic understanding of the emergence and transfer of brand meanings is essential to design well-grounded marketing strategies. Yet, research to date has grasped the phenomenon of brand meaning alteration mostly within isolated, theoretical concepts, such as Consumer Brand Sabotage (Kähr, et al., 2016), Doppelgänger Brand Images (Thompson, Rindfleisch, & Arsel, 2006), or Conspicuous Brand Usage (Ferraro, Kirmani, & Matherly, 2013). Hence, the present research was conducted to develop a systematic understanding of how unintended brand meanings emerge outside of marketer’s control. Based on Gioia’s case study approach, the two brands Birkenstock and New Balance were qualitatively explored, as both companies experienced a serious socio-cultural meaning transition over the last years. The findings indicate that marketers need to be aware of consumers taking psychological brand ownership – a possessive state of mind that evokes unpredictable interpretations and ostentations of brand symbols due to consumers’ desire for self-identity construction (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001). Psychological ownership is identified to impact both consumption practices and the process of meaning movement (cf. McCracken, 1986). In both cases, marketers lost control of their brands, as consumers utilized them to construct their self-identity and therefore altered the brands’ publicly perceived meaning. Whereas the brand meaning alteration had a positive outcome for Birkenstock, New Balance suffered badly under its brand disruption. Based on the researched insights, three key propositions are developed, which should support marketers to foresee, prevent, and countervail the emergence of unintended brand meanings.