Enlightening the brand building–audience response link

Abstract

In an era where brands try to generate strong and positive consumer responses in an uncertain, complex, unpredictable, and fast-changing environment, understanding the mechanism that brand signals turn to external audiences’ responses has become ever more important. Using as a context service brands, given their complexity, this work aims to update and inform existing knowledge on brand building practices, audience-processing and the brand-related action link. The proposed conceptual brand building and audience response framework is based on an extensive review of existing brand management and services marketing academic knowledge collected and examined aiming to: (a) synthesise the somewhat dispersed literature on firms’ brand building and audience-processing and brand-related action link reported in both literature streams and (b) identify relevant trends on brand building and audience-processing/responding. The introduced framework comprises three components (the chain, the influencing factors and the feedback loops), provides a good, contemporary overview of the full brand identity co-creation process and potential audience behavioural responses and unfolds avenues for future research.