Consumer-brand relationships: an unconventional communication perspective

The lure for multisensory experiences and aesthetic innovation calls for the development of new flexible rules that encourage the exploration of unconventional paths, but at present a shared conceptualization of unconventional communication dimensions is still missing. So we advocate for a basic research aimed at: systematizing and empirically grounding current approaches to UC; exploring how adv professionals conceive and articulate unconventional communication; identifying communication approaches developed by adv professionals to pursue consumer-brand relationships; and uncovering the role of unconventional communication in supporting consumer-brand relationships. As for the method, we conducted a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of advertising professionals. We analysed our data adopting a software-assisted content analysis method that makes it possible to carry out a rigorous treatment of a text corpus pointing out recurrent themes, semantic links among them, co-occurrences and correspondences among portions of text. Based on our findings, agency professionals share a perception that today building consumer-brand relationships is a vital priority to enhance brand value. They see consumer-brand relationships characterized by physical proximity based on multisensory experiences between consumers and brand, and value-based proximity relying on reciprocal listening and respect. In their representation, consumer-brand relationships appear as a multidimensional conceptual territory where brand and consumers encounter at different levels emphasizing the co-construction of brand narratives, their genuine sharing with peers, and the immersive and ubiquitous presence of the brand in consumers’ life as key elements in establishing closer and more intimate consumer-brand relationships. In this multidimensional territory unconventional communication seem to act as brand-related cues that are capable of designing future trajectories of CBR development. These evolutionary trajectories have the potential to overcome space and time boundaries thanks to a pervasive and dynamic use of physical and virtual consumer touch-points that are embedded in an ideal “tomorrow and everywhere” sphere of consumers’ life. In this sphere unconventional communication allows envisioning a bridge between brand and consumers’ sensitivities that may enable the brand to achieve an aspirational positioning. In agency professionals’ view the design of consumer-brand relationships evolutionary trajectories calls for a disruptive change attitude toward unconventional communication that dynamically challenges established rules reconfiguring systematically unpredictable relationship territories relying on new and unexpected interaction modes