Analysing Iconic Consumer Brand Weblogs

The stories consumers report and tell in which they use brands as props or anthropomorphic actors increasingly form a key part of personal and community Weblogs.These stories are drama enactments enabling the storytellers to experience powerful myths. The brand stories consumers tell on purchasing-consumption requires a protagonist consumer to experience an “inciting incident” (McKee 2003) that focuses her attention and results in action in response to this incident. Since stories help to make sense of the world around us it is not surprising that consumer storytelling about brands extends beyond highly risky consumption acts to the more mundane and improvisational presentations of self (to self and others) in everyday life. With an understanding of the structure of the brand stories consumers report and tell on Weblogs this study compares the application of semantic analysis software (Smith 2000) automating the text analysis with a manual interpretation involving the human mind using Heider’s balance theory to examine the stories consumers report about two well known clothing brands in naturally occurring contexts on Weblogs. Taking this approach, one can gain insights in determining if market researchers can automatically process Weblogs to obtain brand story abstractions. STORIES ICONIC BRANDS TELL Holt (2003) proposes that some brands become icons. These iconic brands permit consumers to experience powerful myths consciously or unconsciously. Myths are simple stories with compelling characters and resonant plots; myths help consumers make sense of the world. “Myths provide ideals to live by, and they work to resolve life’s most vexing questions. Icons are encapsulated myths. They [icons] are powerful because they deliver myths to us in a tangible form, thereby making them more accessible” (Holt 2003, p. 44). The most successful icons rely on an intimate and credible relationship with a rebel world: Nike with the African-American ghetto, Harley with outlaw bikers, Volkswagen with bohemian artists, Apple with cyberpunks. (Holt 2003, p. 44) Copyright © 2002, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Examining an unsolicited self-reported (emic) story, Woodside and Chebat (2001) apply Heider’s balance and change theories in examining how a Jewish couple consciously copes with automatic-unconscious retrievals of Nazism and the Holocaust when considering the purchase of a German car (cf. Holt 2002). The work of several other scholars in consumer behavior (e.g., Adaval & Wyer 1988; Arnold & Wallendorf 1994; Hirschman 1986; Holt & Thompson 2004; Padgett & Allen 1997) and in related fields of human inquiry (Bruner 1990; Mitroff & Kilman 1976; Orr 1990; Shank & Ableson 1977; Zukier 1986) support the view that, “...people think narratively rather than argumentatively or paradigmatically” (cf. Weick 1995, p. 127; Wells 1980). Research on storytelling (e.g., see Arnould & Wallendorf 1994; Fournier 1998; McKee 2003; Shank 1990; Zaltman 2003) is useful because it helps clarify and deepen knowledge of how people resolve paradoxes triggered in their minds by unbalanced states (ranging from a vague conscious feeling of unease to awareness of a problem or opportunity arising from an inciting incident). Learning stories enables the researcher to examine the complexity often associating with initial balanced states (e.g., the personal prequel history of the protagonist and supporting actors in a story that affects how consumers interpret the situation in which an inciting incident occurs) that lead to imbalance and the steps taken (consciously and unconsciously—see Wegner 2002) to achieve old or new balance states. A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth” (McKee 2003, p. 52). This paper examines case study data to probe the nature of stories about brands found on Weblogs using semantic analysis software as well as the human mind. CONSUMER STORYTELLING THEORY Consumer storytelling theory builds on several related streams of theory and research including Holt and Thompson’s (2004) view that dramatic consumption experiences must be scripted, either by experiential service providers or within the institutional structure of a consumer subculture. Thus, the structure of a word of mouth (WOM) communication is an important indicator of whether or not the message is a story. A story’s structure includes two important elements: chronology and causality (Delgadillo & Escales 2004). Regarding chronology, narrative thought organizes events in terms of a temporal dimension: action occurs over time. Time figures in narrative format as episodes (e.g., scenes within acts in a drama); each episode has a beginning, middle, and end, whereas time in reality is an undifferentiated continuous flow (Bruner 1990; Escales 1998; Polkinghorne 1991). “Second, narrative thought structures elements [scenes, action, talk, and acts] into an organized framework that establishes relationships between the story’s elements [e.g., actors including persons, products, and brands, see Fournier 1998] and allows for causal inferencing” (Delgadillo & Escales 2004, p. 187). Escales (1998) provides a narrative structure coding scale that reflects her assessment of the literature (see Bruner 1990 and Gergen & Gergen 1988) on what makes for a “good,” or well-crafted, story. Bruner (1990) proposes two dimensions that relate to crafting a good story: the landscape of action and the landscape of consciousness. Consumer psychology and psychoanalytic research on brands as anthropomorphic identities, archetypes, and brands as icons (see Fournier 1998; Hirschman 2000; Holt 2003, 2005; Rapaille 2004) informs consumer storytelling theory. For example, a consumer and brand may be bound in a kinship relationship by automatic (unconscious triggering) of inheriting brand use from the consumer’s mother; Fournier (1998) describes 15 consumer-brand relationship forms including arranged marriages, kinships, flings, secret affairs, enslavements, courtships, and others). Jung (1916/1959, p. 101) defines archetypes as “forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myth and at the same time as autochthonous [biologically-based unconscious thinking] individual products of unconscious origin. Campbell (1968, 1974) argues that most archetypal forms originated in Sumer and Akkad around 2500 B.C. Without referring to earlier work by Jung, Campbell, or Hirschman, Holt (2003) interprets storytelling in television commercials as manifestations of archetypes. Holt and Thompson (2004, p. 425) advance such archetypal analysis in their analysis of two consumers’ self stories; Holt and Thompson propose through their analysis that “American mass culture idealizes the man-of-action hero—an idealized model of manhood that resolves the inherent weaknesses in two other prominent models (the breadwinner and the rebel)—what we call the ideology of heroic masculinity—to construct themselves in dramatic fashion as man-of-action heroes.” (Hunt (1993) criticizes Holt’s (1991) prior argument that such interpretative research should not be subject to audits, triangulation, and purposive sampling but that they should be judged on their insightfulness “and their ability to convince the reader, no more.” Hunt tellingly differs to this view, nevertheless, the interpretations by Holt (2003) and Holt and Thompson (2004) are convincing.)