419 European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, © 2008 Towards a Narratology of Brands?

The meanings of brands are among the most valuable and effective symbolic resources of contemporary consumer culture (Levy 1959, p. 119). Understanding their emergence, evolution, and socio-cultural influences is consequentially a central aim of marketing and consumer culture research (Arnould and Thompson 2005). Traditionally, marketing researchers have studied brand mean-ings from either micro and macro perspectives. Micro-level ap-proaches predominantly employ quantitative measures, for in-stance, of brand personalities (Aaker 1997) and brand images (Gardner and Levy 1955; Keller 1993) that accumulate consumers’ associations with brands. These approaches reliably represent the actual literal connections that consumer make with a brand, but systematically neglect the ideologies, tensions, and cultural re-sources that influence these associations over time and space (Fira