Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research
I'm lucky that since this article came out (1998), many of the concepts Fourier discusses have been adopted into marketing and brand concept strategies (at least, where I am earning my degree). I found that this article also somehow re-enforced something Abby Margolis once taught me about objects and brands in relationships: people are not always looking for who they are, but sometimes, a balance of who they think they'd like to be in context... ie: sometimes, a teenage girl wants to feel just a little like a responsible woman (when she's washing her face?), which means that marketing a brand to someone doesn't always mean trying to pretend to be like your audience, but remembering to provide an authentic representation of the value delivered by a product: sometimes soap is better seen as responsible than fun.
The life stories provided by Fournier were hard for me to get through, and I worry about where any border between storytelling and data is supposed to exist... are the soft sciences about interpretation with a back-story of data? (I need to interview more design researchers about this.) When tabled-out, the relationships were delightful and so humanistic that I was forced to subject my neighbor to a long and drawn-out conversation about how his relationships with brands fit into this type of table. Super fun.
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