Constructing Consumer-Masstige brand relationships in a volatile social reality
通过消费者访谈和社交媒体内容分析，研究消费者如何与大众奢侈品牌建立多重、动态且多变的关系，揭示品牌地位在线上线下多方对话中持续协商的过程。
This article conceptualises how consumers construct their relationships with masstige brands. Drawing on a two-stage methodology of consumer interviews and online content analysis of brands’ social media pages, we offer innovative insight into how consumers navigate consumer-masstige brand relationships (CMBRs). We present CMBRs as multiple, dynamic and capricious relationships, departing from the view of enduring brand relationships as monogamous marriages. The unique symbolic nature and more central role of masstige brands in consumers’ identity projects, make CMBRs more intense and transient. The findings illustrate that ‘masstige’ brand status is continually negotiated within a complex web of on– and off-line dialogues between multiple actors (the consumer, masstige brand, other consumers and other brands (masstige, low/middle market and luxury)). Consumers expect masstige brands to be more responsive to their needs. The role of marketers as collaborators and enablers in consumers’ identity projects is therefore more intense in CMBRs.