Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World

CHAPTER 9Building Strong Connections between Brands and the Self

Neal J. Roese and Wendi L. Gardner

Introduction

Marketers have long known that connecting a brand to the consumer’s sense of self can bring powerful rewards in loyalty and profitability. Great brands from Coca-Cola to Harley-Davidson and Amazon to Apple have succeeded not only by offering superior products and services but also by affording the opportunity to clarify and enhance the consumer’s sense of who she is and how she fits into society. At the extreme, customers emblazon brand logos throughout their homes (a Coca-Cola–themed kitchen) and even onto their bodies (a Harley-Davidson tattoo), powerfully testifying to an enduring connection between the self and the brand. But building such self-expressive brands is not easy, and misunderstandings of the psychology of the self can result in costly mistakes.

Psychologists conceptualize the self as a knowledge structure in human memory that motivates individual behavior, including purchasing and consumption. This chapter provides an overview of the current psychological understanding of the self to provide a guide to smart branding decisions in the hyper-connected era.

The Self

Psychologists define the self as a component of human memory. The self is one knowledge structure among many that resides in human memory. A knowledge structure is a network of related information linked together by shared meaning. Knowledge structures consist of discrete bits of information ...