نام های تجاری به عنوان عوامل ارادی : پاسخ ما به تفسیر

We are grateful for the stimulating and hospitable welcome to us as guests in consumer psychology. As sojourners, we share a keen interest, but know that we come to visit without knowing the territory intimately. Granted, Chris Malone is an experienced, senior marketing practitioner who now owns a research-based consulting firm with a particular interest and specialization in this area. In addition, Nicolas Kervyn, trained as an experimental social psychologist, has worked and consulted in marketing. Susan Fiske, trained as an experimental social psychologist, had kibitzed in consumer psychology since she first served on the JCP board as an assistant professor. However, none of us has imperialist ambitions in consumer psychology. We are happy nonetheless to offer our framework as what seems to us a potentially useful complement to prior and ongoing related work. These exceptionally thoughtful commentaries broaden and inform our framework (Kervyn, Fiske, & Malone, 2012--this issue). In return, we offer some responses regarding our own view of the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF), its parent, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), and relationships with the commentators’ own contributions.

While certainly the BIAF and the brand evaluation methods used in our studies are limited, as the commentators note, our primary intention was to show that consumers can and do perceive brands through the specific lenses of warmth and competence, and that these perceptions lead to similar emotions and behaviors as in the well-established SCM. Further, this supports the hypothesis that consumers judge and form relationships with brands in ways that are similar to their interactions with other people, a point entirely compatible with the views of most commentators. Our work thus far suggests that while interesting and supportive of that core hypothesis, the 2 × 2 BIAF matrix might not be particularly useful for brand competitive analysis or positioning purposes. However, it does demonstrate the point that brands can elicit similar perceptions and emotions as social groups, which seems useful in and of itself.

Warmth and competence fundamentally drive human social behavior, so perhaps conventional brand constructs can be strengthened and updated by integrating them The notion that warmth and competence perceptions, emotions, and behaviors developed adaptively, as a means of human survival, has recently become well-accepted. By definition, then, the emergence of branded trade and commerce of products and services certainly came much later in human development. Since current notions of brands and consumer relationships with them were developed without the benefit of these fundamental insights on human social behavior, perhaps these can be strengthened and updated with warmth and competence in mind. We are not at all suggesting that previous brand constructs are not already correct and valid, but rather somewhat that they could be further enriched by having warmth and competence reflected in their foundation. Of course, we see the academic landscape through BIAF-colored lenses, but our intended implication is the opportunity for integrative research. BIAF hypothesizes that brands are “people,” so reconciling it completely with other constructs may be difficult Many concepts of consumer–brand relationships seem based on the premise that brands are non-human, inanimate objects and the term “relationship” is primarily a metaphor for how consumers interact with them. As a result, brand constructs such as anthropomorphism, love, personality, and attachment have developed in isolation from our more foundational hypothesis—that people were the first brands and that branded trade and commerce have simply adapted human interaction processes to simplify and aid human choices. As a result, we are not inclined to see brands as inanimate creations of post-industrial society that must be diligently studied to reveal their complex and paradoxical nature. We believe a much simpler explanation may be closer to the target. More likely, brands are simply a tangible extension of the individual people and groups that produce them. As a result, consumer perceptions, emotions, and relationships with brands are not with the inanimate objects themselves, but rather with what they know and believe about the people and social groups that produce and sell them. This is why we believe that social perception models are likely to be so useful and predictive of consumer behavior. However, this fundamentally different premise is also likely to make it difficult to reconcile BIAF completely with existing brand constructs. BIAF only scratches the surface of what we can learn from applying social perception insights to brands The response papers offer many valid, insightful, and useful suggestions on additional issues and questions that can be researched in this area moving forward. These should include the application of other social perception models to brands, as well as an exploration of the broader range of warmth and competence dimensions, emotions, and behaviors that are elicited by brands. In doing so, the premise that consumers are indirectly perceiving, emoting, and behaving toward the producers of branded products and services should be strongly considered. Taking this approach will greatly simplify the application of social perception models to brands, as well as facilitate their execution in the real world. After all, they will need to be implemented by people for people in the market place.