Click here for the conference schedule and descriptions of each talk.

Technology makes it ever easier to get marketing messages to customers.  But how deep are the connections?  In June, the Institute for Research in Marketing co-hosted the conference, "Creating and Cultivating Brand Connections" with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Marketing Science Institute (MSI).  At the conference, co-chaired by Carlson School Associate Professor Rohini Ahluwalia, academics and marketing leaders explored how companies can form and foster deep, enduring emotional connections between their brands and their consumers.

In the conference's opening session, attendees heard from brand guru Kevin Lane Keller of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College on brand resonance and how the intensity of the connection consumers feel with a brand can lead to brand loyalty.  Immediately following Keller, presentations on achieving brand resonance in the marketplace were given by what MSI Executive Director Dominique Hanssens terms "a house of brands and a branded house - Carlson Companies and Target Corporation."

Kim Olson of the Carlson Companies emphasized pointed communication, both within a company and to its consumers, and Lance Thornswood shared how Target's affordable chic identity is build by buzz creation, community outreach, and the careful cultivation of Target's unique brand resonance.

Brand attachment 

Moving from brand resonance to brand attachment, CW Park of the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business outlined the reasons that Target's brand strategy is so effective in the marketplace: their brand pleases, enriches, and enables the self.  According to Park, these are not academic terms, but measurable components of a brand's success that relate more strongly to brand performance than traditional attitudinal measurements.  Frito-Lay's Pam Forbus expanded on the need for companies to connect their brands to the self, using her company's forward-thinkign strategy of the co-creation of their brands using consumer-produced ads.  It's efficient, inexpensive, and lets consumers demonstrate what the brand means to them, noted Forbus.

Finally, Vivian Milroy Callaway of General Mills spoke about the evolution of a heritage brand over time.  With changing times and fashions, a brand like Betty Crocker might get stale, but with the successful introduction of new products, an enduring brand can be refreshed and become dynamic again, reinforcing long-established brand attachments.

In the last section of the conference, the Carlson School's Akshay Rao and Baba Shiv of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business delved into choice, attachment, and the role of emotion in brand connections using a new source of data: brain scanning.  Reminding the audience that a brand is a strategic asset, Rao discussed his functional MRI scans of decision-makers and drew implications for brand connection metrics and the design of new product lines.  Shiv explored the idea that choosing and deciding are not the same thing: choices are temporary, but influencing people's commitments to a brand using emotional components affects long-term decision making, regardless of whether the context is consumer marketing, industrial marketing, durables, or any other field.

Commenting on the conference this summer, Jan Elsesser, an Institute for Research in Marketing advisory board member from GfK Custom Research, asserted that it was one of the best conferences she'd ever attended, particularly in its juxtaposition of academics and marketing professionals discussing the same issues.  "The thinking side and the practical side came together nicely," Elsesser said.  Conference co-chair Rohini Ahluwalia summed up, "Rigorous research that matters and is applicable; that is what our institute strives for."