IMC in digitally-empowering contexts: the emerging role of negotiated brands

Abstract

In current digitally-empowering contexts, the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) paradigm may have lost its ‘original’ customer-centric focus. Drawing on service-dominant logic, the paper examines the changes to IMC when multiple sources of consumer power emerge as central in the value creation process. This change in the focus of IMC likely enables the emergence of negotiated brands, i.e. brands that focus on a marketplace where traditional marketer-created brand value may be replaced by buyer and seller co-created value. The paper argues that this novel type of brand structure represents an appropriate managerial response to multidimensional IMC approaches. As that occurs, four key issues (community-centric orientation, emergent strategy, hybrid communication mix, reciprocity-based assessment) emerge which lead to a number of research questions in the planning and execution of marketing communications in today’s digitally-empowered contexts. All these issues clearly highlight the consumers’ contributions to brand value co-creation, by reaffirming the ‘original’ outside-in perspective of IMC.

Keywords:

• IMC
• consumer empowerment
• service-dominant logic
• negotiated brands
• digital and interactive communication
• reciprocity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

Notes

1 For example, Pitt et al. (2006) explored the nature of open-source brands (such as Firefox), which result from interactions among producers, customers and other stakeholders within brand communities. In their conceptualization of open-source brands (OSs), they affirm that two main brand aspects (meaning and experience) become radically decentralized, heterarchical and very difficult to control unilaterally by the firm. Both these brand elements “become fully open” as they evolve in an ongoing discourse between participants, blurring the distinctions between brand production and consumption.

2 Although the position of Finne and Grönroos cannot be considered to be perfectly in line with Vargo and Lusch’s S-D logic, the underlying concepts of service and value-in-use are very similar. Their approach comes from different European schools of thought and has been defined as customer-dominant logic (CDL - Heinonen et al. 2010; Finne and Grönroos 2017) or consumer-dominant logic (Anker et al. 2015). The main difference of this approach from S-D logic is the explicit assumption that the customer is the central figure in the communication system and is always a value creator, while the firm (as a provider) can only be a value facilitator. While we acknowledge that the focus on customers is certainly useful in managerial terms, we repute that the CDL approach probably risks underestimating the role of firms in value creation and the interplay of multiple actors/stakeholders in the process.

3 Several authors have in fact discussed the possibility of a brand hijack (Wathieu et al. 2002) or anti-branding initiatives (Krishnamurthy and Kucuk 2009), which can be interpreted as a failure in the negotiating of brands and brand value.

4 In S-D logic (in line with research in sociology, organization and management), institutions are shared rules, norms, beliefs, patterns that regulate and constrain action. They are able to connect an individual (or an organization) to a larger social environment, thus making social life predictable (Vargo and Lusch 2016). An institutional arrangement or logic is a set of interrelated institutions.

5 A disclaimer was added to her website to make it clearer that World Nutella Day did not represent the official views of Ferrero, thus guaranteeing reciprocal satisfaction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agostino Vollero

Agostino Vollero (PhD - Marketing Communications) is Assistant Professor at the University of Salerno (Italy),where he teaches Digital Marketing and Social Media Content. His research interest focuses on the impact of onlineconsumer empowerment on brand management, and on the different types of greenwashing in sustainability communication.He published various articles in leading international journals, including the Journal of Business Research,Corporate Social Responsibility & Environmental Management and Journal of Brand Management.

Don E. Schultz

Don E. Schultz holds a BBA from the University of Oklahoma and a MA and PhD from Michigan State University.He is the author of 31 books and over 150 journal articles. He presently is Professor Emeritus (in Service) at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, USA.

Alfonso Siano

Alfonso Siano is Professor at the University of Salerno (Italy). He teaches and carries out research in corporatecommunication and reputation, brand management, marketing communications, CSR communications. He has publishedin a wide range of international academic journals, including the Journal of Business Research, Journal of BrandManagement, Journal of Marketing Communications, Corporate Communications: an International Journal, Sustainability.