Brand wars: consumer-brand engagement as client-agency battlefield

Much of extant literature points to Consumer-Brand Engagement (CBE) as a potential amplifier of the conflicting relational dynamics which have always characterized client and agency relationship. In that context, CBE calls for a conception of consumer-brand relationships as a peer-to-peer dialogue, based on a listening and dialogic capability on the part of practitioners. It is this capability which often conflicts with the competitive and goal-oriented logics which drive marketing decision-making and forces it into the empathetic logics which seem to drive agency decisions. Using that premise of client-agency conflict, an in-depth investigation of practitioners’ views and practices of CBE was conducted. Our aim was to explore how marketing/brand managers and agency professionals currently conceive CBE. We highlight the differences in how each group manages the consumer-brand relationships necessary to achieve CBE. Thus, we develop a potential unifying framework that may help them build a common path in CBE strategies. This conceptual framework applies a circular relational logic starting from a shared outside-in market perspective that points at consumers as the starting point to develop a shared and comprehensive value system which embeds and is nurtured by the value systems of all the actors involved in the CBE process.