Creating and Cultivating Brand Connections
06/06/07 - 06/08/07Minneapolis, MN
- Conference Information
- Agenda
- Conference Summary 
- Conference Presentations
- Photographs
- Executive Director Wrap Up
- Evaluation Form
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Agenda
| Wednesday, June 6, 2007 | ||
| Welcome Reception | ||
| Thursday, June 7, 2007 Session at Carlson School of Management | ||
| Breakfast at the Hotel | ||
| Depart for Carlson School of Management | ||
| Registration | ||
| Welcome and Overview Dominique M. Hanssens, Executive Director, Marketing Science Institute, Akshay Rao, Director, Institute for Research in Marketing, University of Minnesota, and Earl Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Science Institute | ||
| Session One: Big Picture | ||
| Achieving Brand Resonance: How to Create Intense, Active Loyalty Relationships with Your Customers Kevin Lane Keller, Dartmouth College Brand resonance occurs when a customer thinks he or she is totally “in sync” with a brand. Brand resonance is characterized by strong attitudinal attachment, sense of community, and active engagement with the brand. Professor Keller will outline the dimensions of brand resonance and provide guidelines and examples as to how marketers can design marketing programs and activities to best achieve it. | ||
| Carlson: The Evolution of a Reputation Kim Olson, Chief Communications Officer, Carlson Companies As Carlson approached its 70th year in operation, this private, family-owned company was faced with a challenge. No longer simply a holding company, Carlson sought to present its family of brands (including Radisson Hotels & Resorts, Country Inn & Suites, T.G.I.Friday’s, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, and Carlson Marketing Worldwide) as a unified force when it made sense for the customer, the community, or the employee. A tall order, given Carlson’s brands and service employ more than 170,000 people in nearly 150 countries and territories. While the effort is only just underway in the last year, the company is making great strides in capitalizing on the “whole” while not diminishing the strength of each of the owned brands. | ||
| Break | ||
| Deepening our Connection with Guests Lance Thornswood, Group Manager, Interactive Marketing Creative, Target Corporation We believe Target is recognized by not only our bull’s eye logo, but by the way we differentiate our products, offer value, communicate to our guests, and give back to the community. We focus our efforts on building a brand experience that reaches far beyond our guests’ expectations. Target is a place where guests go to find great design at an affordable price. Whether shopping for a toothbrush or a new handbag, we want our guests to find the unexpected. Through strategic efforts that deepen our connection with guests, we strive to build brand loyalty among our core guests. | ||
| Discussion Moderator: Rajesh Chandy, University of Minnesota | ||
| Lunch | ||
| Session Two: Left Brain | ||
| Brand Attachment: Concept, Measurement, and Effects C. Whan Park, University of Southern California One of the most critical issues facing academic researchers and practitioners who study marketing is understanding what impacts consumers’ commitment to a brand, that is, the extent to which they pledge to remain in a long-term relationship with a brand. Consumers who are strongly committed to a brand are not only less expensive to retain, they are less vulnerable to loss from competitive efforts and brand mishaps. Moreover, committed consumers add strong revenue enhancing capacities by their willingness to pay a price premium and their willingness to convert others to the brand. What leads to commitment? We propose that it is brand attachment. In this talk we articulate the conceptual properties of brand attachment, its measurement, and its effects on behavior relative to other competing constructs such as brand attitudes and attitude strength. | ||
| Connecting Through Experience Pam Forbus, Director of Innovation Insights, Frito-Lay, Inc. People don’t buy products. People don’t buy brands. People buy experiences. Brands that consistently deliver relevant and meaningful experiences will generate a loyal following and win in the marketplace. Pam Forbus will discuss some of the ways Frito-Lay is driving experience to generate loyalty. | ||
| Break | ||
| Connecting with Consumers to Build Our Brands Vivian Callaway, Vice President, Center for Learning and Experimentation, General Mills, Inc. Media fragmentation and hectic lifestyles make it even more important to connect with consumers to build meaningful brands. General Mills builds brands by delivering insight-driven benefits across meaningful touchpoints. A newly created tool, Brand Power, is being used to understand consumer commitment to our brands and the drivers of that commitment. A key learning is the critical role that relationship plays relative to more tangible functional benefits. Vivian Callaway will demonstrate how Brand Power is being leveraged to drive increasingly meaningful consumer connections. | ||
| Discussion Moderator: George John, University of Minnesota | ||
| Reception | ||
| Friday, June 8, 2007 | ||
| Breakfast | ||
| Session Three: Right Brain | ||
| Understanding the Emotional Bases of Brand Choice Akshay R. Rao, University of Minnesota One of the most enduring puzzles in consumer choice is the role that demonstrably irrelevant options play in decision-making. We propose that consumers dislike choices that involve trade-offs. As a result, when faced with a choice set that includes two options that are equally attractive for different reasons, consumers experience negative emotions, since they will have to forego an attraction option. However, if such a choice set is enriched with a third, irrelevant option that is dominated by one of the existing options, that existing option will experience an increase in market share because consumers can use a simple decision rule to make a selection. We provide empirical evidence from fMRI scans of consumers making choices to support our claims and draw implications for the measurement of emotional brand connections as well as for product line design. | ||
| The Power of Emotional Branding: Evidence from Neuroscience Baba Shiv, Stanford University This session will highlight several key insights gained through cutting-edge neuroscience research into the way the brain makes decisions. The thrust will be on the role of emotion in decision-making and, therefore, the importance of emotional branding as a route to building a competitive advantage. The session will highlight some traditional as well as nontraditional ways of going down the branding route. | ||
| Break | ||
| Summary Observations Dominique M. Hanssens, Marketing Science Institute | ||
| Panel Discussion: Connecting Customers and Brands Moderator: Mark Bergen, University of Minnesota Panelists: Diane Harper, Vice President of Customer and Channel Insights, Kraft Foods, Inc. James Henney, Senior Vice President Customer Insights, Wells Fargo & Company David Krajicek, Executive Vice President, GfK Brand and Communication | ||
| Closing Rohini Ahluwalia, University of Minnesota | ||
| Box Lunch | ||
| Emerging Contributions from Academia The afternoon session focuses on new analytical developments in the area of creating and cultivating brand connections. While the presentations will be geared toward an academic audience, all conference participants are welcome. | ||
| Session One: Emotional Response Moderator: Barbara Loken, University of Minnesota | ||
| Examining Measures of Emotional Responses to Television Advertising Anca Cristina Micu, Sacred Heart University Eleven advertising research companies agreed to employ their individual methodologies to measure emotional responses to the same four television commercials. This presentation will detail these various measures employed commercially in the United States today to measure emotional responses to television advertising. The theoretical scaffolding is identified for each measure and methodologies that would benefit from further investigation are singled out. While already examined by academics, physiological and symbolic measures of advertising effectiveness are not employed commercially on a large scale. It is possible the industry’s left-brain bias is inhibiting the intuitive and creative side of advertising and brand communication. Key learnings for both academics and practitioners will be presented. | ||
| “BRAND LOVE”: The “WHAT” and “SO WHAT” Aaron Ahuvia, Richard Bagozzi, and Rajeev Batra,* University of Michigan We study the meaning, dimensionality, and measurement of “Brand Love.” We begin with a qualitative study on consumers’ “love for objects,” from which we develop a multi-dimensional conceptualization of what “brand love” might entail, broader than existing discussions in the current literature. We arrive at a “tripartite” construct that includes certain types of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors toward the loved brand. Specific survey questions measured these various sub-dimensions of “brand love,” and student subjects rated both a brand that they “loved” and a same-category brand that they did not “love.” These data were then analyzed to test the validity of our hypothesized “brand love” construct, its discriminant validity from “attitude strength,” and its impact on loyalty intentions and behaviors. Based on these findings, we offer thoughts on how “brand love” can be conceptualized, measured, created, and nurtured. | ||
| Pulling the White Rabbit Out of the Hat: Brand Co-creation in Imperial China Giana M. Eckhardt* and Anders Bengtsson, Suffolk University We trace branding in China from the Song Dynasty (960-1127) to contemporary times, and discuss implications for branding today. In many cases brands were developed by consumers or the government, instead of, or in addition to, the seller. This demonstrates a consumer-initiated branding system that developed independently of brand management initiatives. The contention that multiple stakeholders define the brand in the marketplace challenges the conceptualization of brand management as a manager-centered activity. Rather than assuming that managers define brands through marketing communication, the co-creative nature of brand development suggests that brands evolve in co-operative circles where successful brands align themselves with the consumers they seek to establish relationships with. | ||
| Break | ||
| Session Two: Brand Connections and Their Consequences Moderator: Om Narasimhan, University of Minnesota | ||
| Consumer Differences in Generation of Brand Connections: What Drives Them and How to Harness Their Effects in the Marketplace Rohini Ahluwalia, University of Minnesota This research focuses on consumers’ self-construal, a factor which influences their ability to generate brand connections. It attempts to understand why and which segments of consumers are likely to differ in their ability to generate brand connections, and to predict when these differences are most likely to emerge in the marketplace, and how they might influence branding decisions (e.g., introduction of brand extensions). Strategy implications for harnessing the relational processing (brand connection) abilities of consumers, to enhance a brand’s stretchability in the marketplace, will be discussed. | ||
| The Long-Term Effects of Joining and Participating in Customer Communities René Algesheimer and Utpal M. Dholakia,* Rice University Are customer communities niche marketing programs or can they be used effectively in the mainstream to increase relational behaviors of core customers? To answer this question, we conducted a two-year-long investigation involving 140,120 customers in cooperation with eBay Germany. The results of our controlled field experiment revealed strong evidence that customer communities can be targeted toward a firm’s mainstream customers to increase their emotional connections with the brand, raise their trust for the firm and its other customers, and increase their relational behaviors substantially. | ||
| Calibrating Brand Management Capabilities and Linking Them with Business Performance Neil A. Morgan, Indiana University, Lopo L. Rego,* University of Iowa, and Douglas W. Vorhies, University of Mississippi While there is growing evidence of a relationship between strong brands and the financial performance of the companies that own them, we know little about how firms build and leverage their brand assets. We draw on dynamic capabilities theory and data from Equitrend© for 700+ brands (225+ firms), for the years 2000-2006, to show how brand management capabilities can be calibrated on three dimensions: effectiveness—the firm’s ability to create desirable brand equity outputs; efficiency—the resources consumed in achieving realized brand equity outputs; and learning—the firm’s ability to improve over time both the level of brand equity outputs and the efficiency with which they are created. We provide initial insights into how these dimensions of brand management capabilities can be linked with firms’ business performance. | ||
| Reflections on Academic Session Akshay R. Rao, University of Minnesota | ||
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