Brand Consensus and Multivocality: Disentangling the Effects of the Brand, the Consumer, and the Consumer-Brand Relationship on Brand Meaning

Branding research and practice offer two contrasting perspectives on how much control managers have over brand meaning (Allen, Fournier, & Miller, 2008). The most established tradition positions the brand manager as the main responsible for selecting, implementing, and controlling meaning (Park, Jaworski, & Maclnnis, 1986). The direction of causality is defined as being from the brand manager who crafts and communicates the brand to consumers who, as larger or smaller collectives (segments), receive and evaluate the brand. A fundamental assumption of this approach is that the meaning of a brand is shared by consumers: consumers may vary in terms of how favorable a particular brand association is, but they generally agree on the associations they link to a brand name. BMW is “styling and driving performance,” Volvo is “safety,” and Coke is “Americana and refreshment” (Keller, 2003, p. 87). The ideal case is indeed the brand with a single meaning across segments and markets (Aaker, 1996, p. 104). This understanding of brand perception as generally consensual can be contrasted with a point of view that positions consumers as co-creators of meaning (Allen et al., 2008; Thompson, 1997). From this perspective, brands do not belong to managers; they are contextualized in the broader fabric of consumer culture in which consumers, brand managers and other agents negotiate and reinterpret brand meanings (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). Rather than mere receivers, consumers actively make sense of branded communications by selecting legitimate interpretations that facilitate their life pursuits (Mick & Buhl, 1992). A core assumption of this co-creative approach is that brands are essentially multivocal: consumers diverge significantly in the meanings they ascribe to brands as their personal and social contexts vary. The core question that arises from contrasting these two perspectives is whether consumers predominantly agree or disagree on what a brand means to them. The present study addresses this issue by (1) proposing the construct of brand consensus and conceptualizing brand multivocality in terms of consumer and relationship effects, in line with the Social Relations Model (Kenny, 1994); (2) measuring the relative strength of these effects; and (3) showing that these effects vary in meaningful ways according to characteristics of brands, consumers, and consumer-brand relationships.