Co-creation of Brands

Brands are created through the interactions between the organization and its stakeholders. Thus, brand building involves less managing and more humility, listening and learning together with others.

KNOWLEDGE @ KRISTIANIA: Brand Management

Whose brand is it anyway? The answer to the question of who ‘owns’ a brand might appear to be self-evident. Yet the answer is not as simple as it first seems.

Traditional marketing thinking with its managerial perspective, would argue that it is the company that owns the brand. In one sense this is true. A company owns the intellectual property that has gone into the design and development of the brand. It tries to invest the brand with relevant value and communicate that through its marketing communications.

However, the company does not own the outcome. When Adidas uses the singer Pharrell Williams as the designer for its Human Race sneakers, it aims to suggest specific associations, but whether it succeeds or not is determined by the consumer, not adidas. If I like Williams’ music and adidas I might be spending my evenings with other sneakerheads sharing thoughts about the brand online and perhaps telling people about it when I meet them.

Perhaps then it would make sense to argue that it is you (the consumer) that owns the brand. This is an interesting shift because it taps into the idea that while the company makes an offer, it is the user who determines value through their use of the brand.

Yet,this is slightly misplaced, because what the consumer owns here is the experience of purchase, rather than the brand itself.

• Read also: Why consumers co-create