The Thing About Brand Meaning

The significance of a brand has never been entirely within its owner's control; it has always been in dialogue with the world around it. While marketers painstakingly craft brand messages and creative campaigns that carry meaning intended to appeal to the target customer, it’s the customer who actually makes meaning and, subsequently, shapes the brand’s reputation. In the social media age, that meaning has become ever more freighted with cultural and political implications for not only brand image but also for customers' own identities and reputations. This newly mediated discourse between consumers and brands has created new challenges for contemporary brand managers to not merely steward the communications and IP of the brand but also manage its meaning that is constructed as identity projects for consumers—by consumers.

Brand marketers don’t make meaning; people do. Marketers signal meaning, and people negotiate its validity and potential adoption based on the congruence between their identity project and the brand’s meaning. Therefore, it is critical that contemporary marketers learn to see the world through the lens of the people and signal meaning in such a way that aligns with how they make meaning.