Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand's service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding.

Design/methodology/approach

Combining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena – like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning – manifest from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on Sawyer's (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence.

Findings

Our framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: individual (e.g. employees and customers); interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact); relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet); strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances); and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task.

Originality/value

Service research has only recently embraced a macro–micro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by individual actors.

中文翻译：

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在服务生态系统中引导品牌意义的出现

目的

本文的目的是阐明品牌意义如何通过利益相关者在品牌服务生态系统的多个层面上的共同创造过程演变为一种新兴属性。这为品牌、消费者和社会之间的交集提供了新的见解，并强调了品牌意义共创过程的制度定位性质。它进一步为急需讨论以目的为导向的品牌奠定了整体基础。

设计/方法/方法

将品牌的生态系统视角与社会涌现的概念相结合，可以阐明不同聚合层次上的品牌意义共创。出现意味着集体现象——如社会结构、概念、偏好、状态、机制、法律和品牌意义——从个体的相互作用中体现出来。借鉴 Sawyer (2005) 的社会涌现观点，作者提出了一个过程多层次的框架来探索品牌意义的涌现。

发现

我们的框架跨越品牌意义出现的五个层次：个人（例如员工和客户）；互动的（例如，工作团队或朋友小组互动的地方）；关系（例如，内部和外部参与者相遇的地方）；战略（例如市场和战略联盟）；和系统的（例如监管机构、非政府组织和社会）。它承认品牌定位本质上是一个在广泛的参与者之间协商价值主张和调整行为和信念的共同创造过程，而不是以公司为中心的任务。

原创性/价值

服务研究最近才接受了品牌化过程的宏观和微观视角。本文通过关注品牌意义出现的嵌套服务生态系统以及个体参与者可以（和不能）驾驭这一过程的程度来扩展这一观点。