Brand loyalty is not habitual

Abstract

This chapter reviews a discussion of collective brand relationships situated in an attempt at a social model of brands. The model calls into question some of the basic assumptions that have guided marketing theory on brands for fifty years. In their place it offers a new definition of brands and the key social entities and processes involved in their social construction. Importantly, it has asserted a place for the average and ordinary consumer, and thereby mitigating the tendency to conflate fanatical status with social action. Early brand community work was sometimes cast as only important to the freakishly loyal. A decade of 'real world' reality by practitioners and consumers has shown this to be too limiting. This model uses the notions of the imagined consumer and marketer to broaden the discourse to the larger formulation of the social brand. The chapter discusses the social brand to be a place where disciplines such as psychology and sociology might meaningfully interact.

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