Exploring the Role of sensemaking Narratives in Stakeholders’ Shared Understanding of the Brand

Purpose: An important part of how we sense a brand is how we make sense of a brand. Sense-making is naturally strongly connected to how we cognize about the brand. But sense-making is concerned with multiple forms of knowledge that arise from our interpretation of the brand-related stimuli: Declarative, episodic, procedural and sensory. Knowledge is given meaning through mental association (Keller, 1993) and / or symbolic interaction (Blumer, 1969). These meanings are centrally related to individuals’ sense of identity or “identity needs” (Wallpach & Woodside, 2009). The way individuals make sense of brands is related to who people think they are in their context and this shapes what they enact and how they interpret the brand (Currie & Brown, 2003; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005; Weick, 1993). Our subject of interest in this paper is how stakeholders interpret and ascribe meaning to the brand and how these meaning narratives play out over time to create meta-narratives that drive brand meaning co-creation. In this paper we focus on the concept of brand identity since it is at the level of identity that the brand creates meaning for individuals (Kapferer, 2012; Csaba & Bengtsson, 2006)