Two Sides of the Same Coin: Toward the Push/Pull Model of Relationship Marketing

Abstract

Modern marketing benefits from advances in our understanding of how consumers and brands interact. Specifically, the notion of brands as relationship partners, developed over the last few decades by consumer and social psychologists, provides marketers with multiple empirically validated frameworks for brand-consumer dynamics. One such framework, the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF; Kervyn, Fiske, & Malone, 2012) is of particular utility because it has been validated for application to both brands and humans (as the Stereotype Content Model; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002). Designed to quantify individuals’ perceptions of brands/people, this model allows for the direct comparison of brands with the individuals who patronize them. The present research capitalizes on this capability by using the BIAF to empirically test a novel marketing framework, the Push/Pull model of relationship marketing, which posits that brands appeal to consumers by way of achieving consumer-brand similarity, and that brands can achieve this similarity not only by altering consumers’ perceptions of a brand (push), but also by altering consumers’ perceptions of self (pull). Three studies (total n = 528) aimed to validate the Pull route specifically; results failed to demonstrate that brands can influence consumers’ preferences by altering their self-perceptions. They did, however, succeed in demonstrating a significant relationship between consumers’ perceived similarity to a brand and their positivity of feelings toward that brand, thus indicating that the Push/Pull model remains a plausible source of value to brands and the marketers who steward them.