Special Topics (490-0-22)

Topic

Brand Narrative and Consumer Psychology

Instructors

Kristian Aloma

Meeting Info

Fisk Hall 115: Thurs 5:00PM - 7:50PM

Overview of class

Why do people love some brands and loathe others? How is trust built, and what happens when it falls apart?

Brand Relationships and Consumer Psychology takes up those questions through both a marketing and a psychological lens. We'll work through the research on how narrative operates on the mind — why some brand stories get past counterargument, how people assemble identity out of the brands they choose, and what turns a one-time purchase into an attachment that lasts decades. We'll also look at how those same principles get abused, and what it takes to use them responsibly: in a way that serves the people you're marketing to and the brands you work for.

We'll examine real brands across a range of categories, and you'll diagnose a real brand's relationship with its customers and write the brand narrative that would change it - a case study you can walk an interviewer through and defend.

Course Learning Objectives
1. Articulate what a brand is as a psychological and relational object, and account for competing views of where brands come from, who controls them, and what they do for the people who hold them.
2. Explain the psychological mechanisms — narrative processing, identity construction, meaning transfer, reciprocity, and trust — through which brand relationships form, deepen, and break down.
3. Classify brand relationships along two independent axes: the type and quality of the bond, and the phase of its development from first encounter through integration, maturity, deterioration, and renegotiation.
4. Diagnose a real brand's relationship from consumer and market evidence — its type, its quality across the relationship dimensions, its position on the trajectory, and its fit with the organization's capabilities — and specify the gap between the relationship the brand has and the one its business requires.
5. Design and defend a relationship strategy that closes that gap: the intended relationship, the promise underwriting it, the organizational behaviors that would make it credible, and the business case for investing on a horizon longer than a quarter.
6. Evaluate the ethics of relationship-building practice, distinguishing genuine bond from engineered dependence, and take a defensible position on where influence becomes manipulation.

Class Attributes

Attendance at 1st class mandatory

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: PreReq: IMC 420: Brand Management Foundations