Daniel Dietrich

Voice interfaces are conquering consumer lifeworlds. They offer new ways to consumers to interact with brands and challenge existing brand management theories. By drawing on an explorative approach, this paper identifies four different voice experiences that emerge when consumers access brands through voice interfaces (for instance through personal voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa): (1) brand camouflage, (2) category salience, (3) brand evocation and (4) brand amplification.

The consumer literature on branding coalesces around the notion of brands as essentially contested concepts. Using Gallie’s (1956) seminal theory of contestation as a guide, we develop a novel framework to explain why and how brand contestation surfaces and evolves through mutual disruption practices of both consumers and brand’s legal owners.

The present research project aims to overcome conventional branding theories assuming brand meanings to be under exclusive control by the legal brand owners. Due to the utilization of a practice-theoretical perspective systematic understanding on how and why unintended brand meanings emerge is pursued. The two distinct brand cases Birkenstock and NewBalance are investigated to study the contingency of brand meaning co-optation and contestation. Marketers should be encouraged to detect and prevent momentous brand disruptions.

Who truly owns a brand? Conventional marketing practice commonly designates companies as legal brand owners with the potential to determine a brand's meaning exclusively. However, market reality demonstrates that consumers are increasingly making use of their technologically-mediated capability of appropriating brands for idiosyncratic purposes. These consumer-driven brand utilisations often trigger brand meaning disruptions outside of marketers intention and control. Hence, the focal brand becomes subject to clashing interests of antagonistic market actors and, thus, contested. This can entail momentous and detrimental impacts for a brands meaning and value. Yet, existing branding literature offers neither sufficient theoretical depth to explain such market dynamics thoroughly, nor practical advice on how to handle them purposefully. Therefore, the present research profoundly investigates the socio-cultural phenomenon of contested brands. More precisely, the research objective was to develop a fundamental theoretical understanding of how and why contingencies of contested brands emerge, and what marketers can do to countervail the spread of undesired brand meanings. For this purpose, three distinct studies were conducted by means of a mixed method research approach. Firstly, a conceptual analysis revealed both an overarching conceptualisation and an integrated typology of contested brands. Secondly, a qualitative exploration - enabled by a practice-theoretical research lens - resulted in a comprehensive process model of brand meaning contestations, which explains the interplay of antecedents, market practices, and outcomes of contested brand incidents. Thirdly, by combining qualitative expert insights with quantitative verifications, a set of effective brand protection measures was developed. These measures support marketers in their forecasting, prevention, and counteraction of contested brands. In sum, the research at hand emphasises that brand meanings are no longer under exclusive control of legal brand owners but alter continuously due to contestation practices by antagonistic market actors. This postmodern paradigm of contested brands facilitates both a seminal understanding and a purposeful handling of brands embedded in todays volatile, multilateral, and heterogeneous market structures.