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Multi-modal
Contextualising brand enabling
consumption experiences: technique
a multi-modal enabling technique
151
Sandy Bulmer
School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Received 6 January 2014
Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand, and Revised 6 January 2014
Accepted 7 January 2014
Margo Buchanan-Oliver
Business and Economics, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on a novel multi-modal enabling technique for
contextualising brand consumption experiences.
Design/methodology/approach – A multi-modal interpretive narrative approach is presented as
a means of investigating brands as experiential entities for use in consumer identity projects. It reports
the strategic use of different modes of data collection: autobiographical narratives generated by solo
participants to create a benchmark of identity and subsequent friendship pair guided discussion
interviews. This offers a faster, cheaper and more convenient means of gaining access to consumer
experiences of brands than traditional ethnographic methods, which require prolonged engagements
within a community.
Findings – Consumer narratives of actual brand consumption and of mediated brand consumption
are enhanced using this method. The consumer narratives generated provided rich insights into the
role of brands in contributing to national identity. The contextualised use and function of identity
narratives provided by brands were identified in addition to the identification of national community
rituals of consumption.
Originality/value – The multi-modal use of friendship pair interviews with solo autobiographical
interviews is shown to offer benefits to qualitative consumer researchers focussing on brand/identity
issues. The combination of data collection methods allowed for greater reflexive, memorial and
contextualised discussion in the friendship pair interviews about brand narrative consumption and
generated responses that advance beyond socio-political conventions concerning brands.
Consequently, contextualised brand consumption experiences can be accessed more effectively than
in conventional depth interviews.
Keywords Brands, Consumer research, Autobiographical narratives, Friendship pairs,
Mediated brand experience
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
Brand consumption experience is an important aspect of consumer research which is
under-researched and as Keller (2003) noted, branding is an area of study which is
theoretically underdeveloped. There are calls in the marketing literature for research to
develop a greater understanding of brands (Ballantyne and Aitken, 2007; Brodie et al., Qualitative Market Research: An
2006; Jevons, 2007) especially using new perspectives (and those relating to consumers’ International Journal
Vol. 17 No. 2, 2014
experiences rather than producers’ intentions). Brands are known to be used by pp. 151-167
consumers for purposes other than the persuasive and mostly commercial ones q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1352-2752
intended by brand owners (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998a; O’Donohoe, 1994; DOI 10.1108/QMR-01-2014-0003
QMRIJ Ritson and Elliott, 1999). There is strong evidence to suggest that consumption of brands
17,2 and the cultural symbolism surrounding brands has a role to play in the expression of
self-identity and in fostering community (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995; Cova, 1997;
Firat and Dholakia, 1998; Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2005). However, while there is a body of
research relating to the role of brands in so-called brand communities (Muñiz and
O’Guinn, 2001) there are very few studies, apart from Kates (2004) addressing how
152 brands and brand consumption impact on other forms of community. Furthermore,
while Dong and Tian (2009) investigate consumption of Western brands in asserting
Chinese national identity, there is little else in the literature to suggest how brands affect
the overarching form of community identity, national identity.
The role of the brand is not merely functional, symbolic or psychological (Aaker,
1997; Levy, 1959; Keller, 1993; de Chernatony and McDonald, 1992; Jevons, 2007). Brand
is central to consumption experiences, to signalling between individuals and to
communal projects of co-creating brand meaning. Cova (1997) developed this idea by
pointing to the “linking value” of products and services (and by default the brands that
wrap around them); “this refers to the product’s, or service’s, contribution to establishing
and/or reinforcing bonds between individuals” (Cova and Cova, 2001, p. 70). Joint
consumption of products and services has previously been characterised as being able to
engender communitas, that is, intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging,
often in connection with rituals, as described in Arnould and Price’s (1993) study of river
rafting experiences. Cova’s linking value concept also underpins the view that brand
experiences in some way permit and support social connections and the building of
community. Thus, brands may play a role in uniting consumers within communities and
assisting them in developing a sense of belonging, that is, impacting on identity.
The role and impact of brands on community identity, particularly national identity, is
indirectly addressed in cultural studies, political science, journalism and
mass-communication literature. In general, the power of mass media to both constitute
nations and draw communities together is widely accepted, and more particularly,
advertising is reported to inform the process of conceptualising a nation and producing
nationalism (Askew and Wilk, 2002; Frosh, 2007; Millard et al., 2002; Moreno, 2003;
Prideaux, 2009). In essence, other literatures suggest that advertisements contribute to
national identity. However, researchers in consumer research and marketing have not yet
investigated the logical extension of this argument; that is, if brands typically sponsor
such advertisements, then how do brands affect national identity?
In designing a brand consumption study which takes into account the social uses
aspect of advertising (Ritson and Elliott, 1999), and focuses particularly on brand
consumption experiences that impact on the social self, there are a number of concerns
for researchers. Research participants can be sensitive about revealing too much to
researchers about the personal and cultural relevance of brands, since admitting to
brands having such use may be tantamount to admitting moral bankruptcy and
intellectual shallowness. Furthermore, as Bengtsson and Ostberg (2006) state, in their
experience of researching the cultures of brands, social desirability biases are a problem
when using conventional research approaches. We have developed a method with which
to further explore brand fostered communitas generated between those with shared
social selves as a result of various brand consumption experiences. This method avoids
some of the disadvantages of surveys, orthodox depth interviews, projective techniques
and ethnography. We focus on the generation of consumer narratives as a means
of accessing “hard to get at” consumer identities and uses for brands and brand Multi-modal
narratives. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to elaborate on a novel multi-modal enabling
enabling technique for contextualising brand consumption experiences, with reference
to a bigger programme of research on brands and national identity. technique
The paper is organised as follows: a brief overview of literature pertaining to the
study of brands, brand narratives, national identity and research techniques used to
study these constructs is presented. The research methodology is detailed and findings 153
which illustrate the benefits of our method are presented using selected text units. The
multi-modal approach to the study of brand consumption linked to national identity is
discussed with reference to the benefits offered to our study. The future potential of
such narrative methods in expanding understanding of brands is considered and we
discuss the implications of our method for brand researchers. While we report on the
method and processes used to answer questions about brands and national identity,
we leave discussion of the theoretical issues arising from the findings, relating to
brands and national identity, for reporting elsewhere.

Brands and national identity

Direct consumption, that is, lived purchase and consumption experiences, is the subject of
many studies that connect the symbolic role and meaning of consumer goods with
consumer identity (Belk, 1988; Levy, 1959; McCracken, 1986; Mick, 1986; Holbrook and
Hirschman, 1982). However, for branded goods, direct consumption is only one dimension
that contributes to how brands are experienced. There are also mediated experiences of
brands; marketing communications and personal conversations provide indirect means of
experiencing brands by providing narrative coherence – joining previously unconnected
needs, experiences, and goods – and articulating loosely constructed thoughts about
brands (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998a). Narratives provided by brands are implicitly
part of what is consumed when brands are consumed (see, for example, studies of
advertising consumption, Otnes and Scott, 1996; Mick and Buhl, 1992).
Brands can be understood as evolving through a narrative process “where brands are
developed and ‘storied’” (Jackson et al., 2011, p. 59). While brands are initially conceived
by agents of the brand’s owner, the stories, values and meanings ascribed to specific
brands are actively co-created by consumers (Ritson and Elliott, 1995). In their model of
advertising literacy Ritson and Elliott (1995) suggest that the audience/viewers/readers
work with advertisements (ads) to produce a unique interpretation of brands from the
ads that they view. The way that the brand story progresses depends on the uses the
consumer has for the interpreted meaning and on the person’s unique life experiences
and plans (Ritson and Elliott, 1995). Furthermore, brand narratives are consumed by a
wide cross-section of society and are effectively a community resource. Even those who
are not the target audience and those who do not purchase or consume a branded product
(or service) are potentially co-creators of brand narratives. While brand narratives, in the
general form of advertisements, are widely accepted as impacting on national identity
by cultural theorists, a review of the relevant marketing and consumer research
literature on brands, self and social identity and national identity demonstrates a lack of
knowledge about national identity as it relates to brand experiences.
National identity is a construct that is little studied in the field of consumer research.
Despite this, a review of the literature in several specialist journals devoted to the study
of nations and identity points to numerous contemporary contexts where national
QMRIJ identity is being actively negotiated, and is relevant and important to consumers.
17,2 While processes such as globalisation suggest that consumers increasingly have an
external focus and a global outlook (Levitt, 1983), these very processes are partly
responsible for an apparent increase in the importance and significance of local
identities. As one overarching type of local identity, national identity is a creditable
and relevant contemporary form of personal and community identification.
154 National identity is a powerful social imaginary identity:
[. . .] essential for very many people to give meaning to their lives, vital for their secure sense
of self-respect, essential for their sense of belonging and security: all things of fundamental
value to human beings (Nielsen, 1999, p. 120).
Societies can be enabled and become more productive when they have a well-developed
and strong sense of national identity (Aldridge, 2002). Certainly, national identity may
be facilitated by forward thinking museum and library sectors, public service
broadcasting and local programming. Advertising is also regarded as playing a central
role in conceptualising the nation in various social science literatures. These studies of
nationalism, culture and politics comment on the part played by ad campaigns which,
for instance, presented consumption of Corona beer as evidence of Mexico’s successful
industrialisation in the 1950s (Moreno, 2003, p. 126), Suncorp Bank’s advertising
premise of supporting the “great Aussie dream of home ownership” by positioning
themselves within the broader Australian national discourse (Prideaux, 2009, p. 623),
and Motorola’s Israeli brand of cellular phone services “Escape” which claimed
“Yesh Le’an (There is somewhere to go)” as a reflection of how the Israeli nation
conceptualised itself, as under siege, with suicide bombings and widespread insecurity
(Frosh, 2007, p. 478). Advertisements in the mass media act as a shared cultural resource
and advertising activity contributes to the nation’s sense of itself. However, despite the
fact that brands are the sponsors of such advertisements and brands are partially
consumed and experienced via their advertisements, there is little understanding of the
relationship between brands and national identity within the marketing literature, and
how brands affect national identity.

Methodological issues in research on consumer uses of brands

Understanding the social identity use value of brands requires a methodology that is
able to illuminate brand consumption experiences in a naturalistic and indirect manner.
Any exploratory study of the consumption of brand narratives linked to experiences of
national identity is going to run into some difficulties. As Bengtsson and Ostberg (2006)
suggest, there are inherent problems in getting beyond the culturally accepted ways of
relating to brands, and the risk for consumer research into brand roles in consumer
culture, is that participants produce stories that overplay or underplay their actual
thoughts and feelings. The problem has been in finding how to uncover brand
consumption experiences that impact on consumers’ sense of themselves, their identities
and the communities they feel part of.
There is a rich literature on research methods for studying various aspects of brands,
with many more studies concentrating on topics with direct managerial relevance,
rather than on the consumption of brands as a phenomenon worthy of study in its own
right. A review of the literature concerning consumer uses of brands identifies two
dominant techniques used by researchers. First there are survey instruments, where
both online and pencil and paper questionnaires are administered – see, for example the Multi-modal
study designed to measure brand usage in connection with quality and self-identity enabling
signals (Strizhakova et al., 2011). Second, there are depth interviews, designed to elicit
narratives about brand usage, consumer relationships with brands and other similar technique
topics (Fournier, 1998; Schembri et al., 2010). A number of other less common techniques
are also used including, projective techniques (e.g. invoking autobiographical childhood
memories, Braun-La Tour et al., 2007) and utilising collages and free associations 155
(Koll et al., 2010), ethnography (Coupland, 2005), and those techniques based on
ethnographic principles, such as videography (Belk and Kozinets, 2005) and
netnography, which have been utilised in consumption studies, particularly relating
to brand communities (Cova and Pace, 2006).
While actual consumption of brands is addressed in the literature, there are
relatively few published studies of consumers’ mediated experiences of brands – that
is to say studies of how brand stories, provided by marketing communications, are
consumed and used by media audiences. Accessing consumer experiences of brand
narratives and investigating the ways that consumers use brand stories for their own
purposes is subject to a number of challenges. Elliott and Wattanasuwan’s (1998b)
conceptual paper on the process of consumption of the mediated experience of
advertising and the lived experience of the consumption of products/services (which
was not explicitly focused on brands) makes some observations on how to approach
empirical research in this domain. They note that “interpretive research employing
naturalistic modes of enquiry via ethnographic fieldwork is the most appropriate
approach to understanding the interpretation of meaning and construction of identity”
(Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998b, p. 18).
The technique of interviewing pairs of adult consumers together to gain insights into
social interactions and communitas is less obtrusive and more naturalistic than surveys
and one-one interviews. This relatively underused approach, although used in commercial
market research (and sometimes known as affinity pair interviewing), has not often been
reported in academic studies of consumers and marketing issues, with a few notable
exceptions (Banister and Hogg, 2004; Bayley and Nancarrow, 1998). Banister and Hogg
(2004) note that joint interviews create a supportive feeling, assist in generating rapport
between the parties in the research setting and in accessing the diverse experiences of each
person. Furthermore, commercial researchers suggest that studies with friendship pairs
offer greater openness and honesty and less posturing because friends know each other so
well and can easily call each other’s bluff (Greenfield, 2004). The friendship pair interview
approach assumes that people will speak about an experience more thoroughly, and
self-censor less than in situations where they are with strangers (the typical focus group
situation). Friendship pair interviews allow the researcher in-depth contact with
participants and the opportunity to fully experience interactions and responses between
two people. Importantly, they allow observation of social interaction at very close
quarters, and ideally enable the participants to talk naturally to each other during much of
the interview, co-creating a shared and memorialised expression of identity, with the
researcher as a minor player in proceedings.
With this and Bengtsson and Ostberg’s (2006) concerns in mind, our programme of
study was designed to investigate how national identity is experienced in brands and
the ways that consumers use brands for their own national identity projects within a
particular national context, that of New Zealand.
QMRIJ Research methodology
17,2 A two-part multi-modal interview methodology was designed for this research. First,
in initial interview sessions (between one and two hours duration), autobiographical
narratives were elicited from 20 middle aged female participants. In the second
follow-up interviews, friendship pairs of participants (previously interviewed alone)
discussed brands and national identity with each other and the researcher in similar
156 length sessions. All interviews were digitally audio-taped, transcribed and the
qualitative data management software programme NVivo8 was used to organise data
and facilitate repeated coding, abstraction and systematic comparisons.
The selection criteria for recruitment ensured that participants spoke English and
considered themselves to have a New Zealand national identity. Furthermore, age and
gender requirements ensured that participants matched the target market for many
brand communications – middle aged household shoppers – and shared these
characteristics with the interviewer, the principal researcher. The justification for
using women participants also takes into account reports in the literature that suggest
that same gender interviewee and interviewer pairs facilitate personal conversations
relating to lived experiences and that all-female focus groups (or interviews) lead to
very high levels of disclosure about a topic and expressiveness, leading to more
richness in the narrative text (Fern, 2001; Burns et al., 2000).
Autobiographical narrative elicitation was used to generate stories developed by
reconstructing the past in a meaningful way, with reference to events and experiences
which contributed to identity. These narratives provided a baseline for later interviews
regarding experiences of brands and national identity. The researcher briefed each
person in advance and asked them to be ready to tell the story of their life as it illustrated
(or ran counter to) what they considered to be typical New Zealand life. The researcher
posed a single question aimed at inducing narrative at the start of each autobiographical
interview. Since the process was unlike other market research “question and answer”
sessions that participants may have been familiar with, it was sometimes necessary for
the researcher to support and encourage people in telling their story and in producing a
narrative. Once participants had finished their initial story the researcher then followed
up with a series of probes which were designed to draw out more narratives, focusing on
points of interest and clarifying anything that was unclear. At no time did the researcher
ever mention brands or advertising – the emphasis was entirely on life history. Soon
after listening to playback of these sessions, summary sheets of key themes were
prepared for participants and submitted to each person for approval and follow-up
phone discussion with the researcher.
Friendship pair interview settings were designed to be naturalistic and relaxed,
imitating normal conversational interactions between friends as much as possible.
Participants were briefed in advance to expect a short joint review of the earlier
autobiographical interviews and a guided discussion style of conversation, which
started with viewing several contemporary television advertisements on the
researcher’s laptop computer. The process served to re-focus participant thoughts on
their own life stories and to stimulate pair conversations and as they compared notes.
It should be noted that the advertisements were carefully selected by an expert panel as
potentially relevant to a discussion of New Zealand identity. The advertised brands
included a range of popular fast moving consumer goods, banks, insurance companies,
airlines, vehicles and retailers with well-known foreign and local origins.
However, these “conversation starter” brands only served to initiate discussion and Multi-modal
any responses to them do not form part of this paper. enabling
technique
Findings
First, the findings illustrate how the autobiographical mode of data collection captured
mention of brands within the context of a lived life. 157

Actual brand consumption – autobiographical interviews

During the autobiographical narratives, reference to actual brand consumption
sometimes flowed as a natural part of the story. In some cases the participants
spontaneously recalled events and occasions where brands had played a significant
part, giving some indication of the meaning and role of the brand in the context of a
typical New Zealand life. In the following text-units various brands are highlighted,
showing where they genuinely formed part of a longer, more detailed personal life
story, with no prompting or assistance from the researcher:
Elaine: I can remember my brother having his 13th birthday and we got KFC and thinking it
was really cool. You know but we did not have all these other fast foods and things you know.
Georgina: Oh, God (laughing). When we were in America they had a New Zealand Society
picnic every year, so we’d go there and we’d do the, we, we took our Hokey pokey ice cream
and there was the gum boot tossing competition which they thought was hilarious [. . .] and
then we had the lolly scramble with the Minties and the Jaffas and the Pineapple Lumps. And
then we got the New Zealand lamb on the barbie and, so all those traditional things.
In other cases, participants mentioned significant brands which to them were markers of
New Zealand identity, understood to be recognised by an insider as typically from
New Zealand. These brands were so distinctive that they acted as a short-hand means of
encapsulating unique aspects of New Zealand identity, first through the product itself
(e.g. Marmite, a savoury yeast spread) and also through the iconic representation of the
brands (e.g. Four Square, a small grocery store heritage brand, and Longest Drink in Town,
branded milkshake cups):
Fiona: Oh, and then things like, things about, I had to tell my exchange student so she could
grasp what is essentially New Zealand so we had to make sure, you know, we had Marmite
on our toast.
Georgina: The Four Square. I’ve got a friend who’s got the latest Four Square t-shirt. It’s one
of those things from childhood, along with the giraffe on the Longest Drink in Town.
In the following text-units Nicola started talking about her adventures in small town
New Zealand, and noted that even the smallest towns have at least one old fashioned
pub. Her thoughts about pubs developed into talk about drinking, leading to the
mention of a particular brand of beer which was loaded with cultural meaning, as one
of the brands which helps define masculinity in New Zealand:
Nicola: Especially in, I think more rural, like the farming community, like after they’ve had a
good day’s work on the farm, a nice cold beer is the best thing. Yep. I think so. People that
I know that, farming that, and they love their cold beer. The old, used to be always the Lion.
Lion Red. The crate of Lion Red. Swappa crate (laughter).
QMRIJ As the text-units above show, the autobiographical narratives provided the researcher
17,2 with the means of identifying brands as they were experienced and contextualised by
the participants. The manner in which reference to the brand consumption occurred
was uncontrived and sincere.

Mediated brand consumption – autobiographical interviews

158 Not only did participants refer to actual brands and their memories of them situated
within their individual autobiographical narratives, they also made reference to
mediated brand consumption – to the ads and brand narratives they had consumed.
In alluding to brand ads the participants subtly invoked themes of importance to the
national community. Many of the themes cropped up repeatedly in the course of the long
autobiographical narratives, so the examples provided for the reader are only indicative
of brand advertising themes throughout the wider study. In the following text unit about
a brand of durable woollen farm/outdoor clothing, Ingrid refers to the rural imagery that
underpins the myth of being a nation founded on the farming sector and being closely
connected to the land. This theme is also linked with the national identity theme of
casualness, and a lack of sophistication and finesse:
Ingrid: I guess there’s sort of, I guess sort of stereotypes like the, I do not know, like sort of the
farmer and gumboots and sort of, you know, Swanndri and so on like we see on ads on television.
Jackie referred to a television ad for Lemon and Paeroa (L&P) and analysed her own
reaction to the narrative supplied by the soft drink brand. Despite the actual imagery
shown in a recent ad being outside the range of her own memories, the general themes
and intentions spoke to her of an identifiable shared time and place in the cultural
memory of New Zealand:
Jackie: If I think that what makes up a New Zealander, in a way, [it] has broadened over the years,
become more comprehensive [. . .] what I was also thinking, I think of those Lemon & Paeroa ads,
I think of them, that had the images of New Zealand in 1950s or 60s. Now a lot of that I do not
actually have a personal memory of [. . .] but I related to it, “cause it related to some story that
I find recognisable, again, in my mind, about New Zealand”.
In another session, while talking about what New Zealanders are known for, Sharon’s
thoughts roamed through a variety of themes including the importance of rugby, before
eventually landing on the phrase “nuclear free.” This free-association flow immediately
triggered her memories of a recent TV commercial. The text-units that follow recount
how the American actor Harvey Keitel, featuring in a beer ad, articulated two of the most
heroic stories that New Zealanders love to tell themselves:
Sharon: But you’re got, what’s the ad on TV that they do that, oh, Steinlager ad, they always
bring that up in? Is it Steinlager that it’s in?
Researcher: Is it? I can’t remember seeing a Steinlager ad lately.
Sharon: Yeah, where they say. You say “no to genetic engineering”, you say “no to nuclear”, you
say “no, is it all worth it?” and he opens a Steinlager and he goes “It’s worth it” (laughter). That,
that’s quite cool that, how he does that, I mean regardless of what he’s advertising. But it was
like well, you’re only little but you say “no” to this and “no” to this. And they show pictures of,
the genetic engineering one always cracks me up, it’s this tiny little dog that’s all munted *
walking along with this big high person with this tiny little dog, “You say ‘no to genetic
engineering’” and there’s this horrible munted dog. And I go “Yeah, we do” (laughter).
Note: *Munted is a term which means damaged, broken, destroyed or altered beyond Multi-modal
recognition. enabling
While brands and brand narratives surfaced naturally during the telling of
autobiographical stories, the friendship pair interviews provided a different context in technique
which to observe consumer experiences of brands, in relation to national identity.

Mediated brand consumption – friendship pair interviews 159

The second mode we adopted for the interviewing protocol also generated insights into
brands. During the pair interviews the friends watched some brand ads and talked about
them with reference to their previously disclosed conceptions of New Zealand national
identity. This process started them thinking more about brands and identity, setting
the scene for the following question: “Can you think of some brands other than the ones
that we’ve seen that help you feel the way that you do about New Zealandness?” In the
following text units Cathy and Donna nominate a cheese brand and talk about the
advertising stories between themselves:
Cathy: Mainland, the new version of the old Chesdale I reckon. Two old fellas and they tell a
story and they tell jokes and they’re mates and [. . .]
Donna: Yeah, that’s quite cool, it’s well made.
Cathy: Yeah, there’s lots of different little ads for them. Walking up the countryside, doing old
farm things.
Donna: And they sit there and watch the seasons go past for that vintage one, eh?
Cathy: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Yeah. Or they tell cheddar jokes. That one’s quite funny.
Donna: Yeah, and they’ve got really nice scenery down in the South Island.
Cathy: Mm. So that’s a bit, yeah, advertising New Zealand.
In the discussion, the pair creates a joint narrative and discusses the brand in a natural
way, telling a story to the interviewer. From just one initial interviewer question they
generate details about the different executions they have seen, their attitudes towards
the ads, and refer to iconic scenery already deemed central to national identity. This
depth of response would be most unlikely in a traditional single person interview
unless the participant was exceptionally garrulous.
In the next text units Elaine and Fiona are talking about Speight’s beer, one of the
brands they had nominated in answer to the question about New Zealandness.
The researcher then asked them to explain what Speight’s story is and the
conversation developed from there:
Elaine: Do not you think, the black singlets and the gumboots, kind of a bit of a, that kind of
rough, ready, I guess it’s come from the farmer and I think now, I do not know, I just, I do not
know about the image of men being more family orientated, more, I do not know, but (pause),
I do not know what I’m trying to say, like it’s not, like it’s [. . .]
Fiona: You think it does not kind of capture what it’s like, not like the essence of masculinity
or anything anymore, “cause that’s not how we see our men now?”
Elaine: No. Not that sort of chauvinistic really. Where it’s kind of like it’s all about the beer
and the, yeah, that, you know, what you, the Footrot Flats * thing.
QMRIJ Fiona: Yeah,
17,2 Elaine: I mean I think, yeah I wouldn’t think that that was a big part of New Zealand. That
might be a generation thing, I do not know really.
Note: *Footrot Flats was a humorous daily comic strip (and later a movie) based on the
foibles of laconic (mostly male) farming characters and the daily struggles of farming life.
160 Their responses indicated that both Footrot Flats and Speight’s were male orientated
consumption narratives. However, the friendship pair mode enabled an uncued and
impromptu enhancement of the original topic as the friends debated the wider cultural
relevance of the rural man myth with each other. Enabled via this mode, one of the
friends posed the question and clarified understanding from her friend, which allowed
for natural conversation flows, memorial free-association, cultural contextualisation
and obviated the need for the interviewer to interject.

Actual brand consumption – friendship pair interviews

In both of the examples above the pairs talked about brand narratives that they had
consumed. However, the pair interview process also allowed for actual brand consumption
stories to be told. While thinking about the brands that give them a feeling of
New Zealandness, the pair spontaneously talked about the importance of certain
confectionery, biscuit and snack food brands in recreating a feeling of home for expatriates:
Karen: Minties.
Lana: Yeah.
Karen: “Moments like these you need Minties” (the advertising tagline).
Lana: I just sent a pack of stuff over to my brother in-law in the States and I sent him
Pineapple Lumps, Cameo Cremes.
Karen: Oh, Cameo Cremes, yeah.
Lana: Yeah.
Karen: Pineapple Lumps, I always send Pineapple Lumps.
Lana: Yeah, Jaffas. I sent Cheezels and Twisties.
The text units above provide a small sample of their comments about brand consumption
rituals and brands purchased for certain occasions. Karen and Lana’s thoughts were
typical of the sentiments expressed by many of the other pairs. Very particular rituals that
function as common consumption practices for the nation were described for many
brands, especially food and drink brands. Overall, the friendship pair interviews offered
many contextualised insights into brands and their role in national identity.
Finally, the findings show how participants reflected on their own narratives as a direct
result of hearing things that their friend said. The pair interview technique allowed for
friends to prompt each other with their shared memories of brands in a bygone era:
Donna: That, “Dear John,” [BASF cassette tapes ] ad used to be cool though. I used to sing that
at school all the time.

Cathy: Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh. I’d forgotten about that one.
The friendship pair technique also facilitated greater access to cultural and brand Multi-modal
memories by providing heightened cues for both participants as they recalled past enabling
behaviours and their practice of brand commentary. It also mitigated any participant
resistance to sharing these behaviours with the researcher. In the following example, technique
Helen makes an impromptu declaration to the researcher after both listening to her
friend’s anecdote and reflecting on the significance of Georgina’s comments.
Originally, when the question of talking about ads with other people was raised by 161
the researcher, Georgina and Helen were very dismissive. However, later on, Georgina
spontaneously discussed a humorous Mitre 10 (hardware retailer) ad, noting how she
had laughed about it with her children and talked about the obvious Australian and
New Zealand stereotypes in the ad. In response, Helen suddenly acknowledged that
despite her earlier insistence that she had never, and would never, speak to other
people about ads, that this was not right:
Helen: And I must have lied and said I haven’t spoken to my children about it, because I’ve
just remembered the ad where the little girl’s driving, boy’s driving the little girl [Hyundai
Santa Fe SUV car ].
In this example, the friendship pair interview mode enabled the participant
to get past her reservations about an insignificant and socio-culturally
undesirable activity, and to recall brand narrative consumption and use in the
context of her family.

Discussion
In recent times brand consultants and practitioner focused publications have
increasingly talked about brands in new ways. Arvidsson (2006, p. 188) notes that
pop management books encourage managers to “take the brand beyond its existence as
a mere symbol of the product and to make it interact with customers in a multiplicity of
sensory, intellectual or even quasi-religious ways.” Others have more straight-forwardly
spoken of brands in terms of being compelling stories – see for example, DDB
Worldwide Communications Group’s report on Brand Narratives (DDB, 2008). The
method detailed in this paper makes a contribution to the study of brands and to the
on-going understanding of what consumers do with brand stories. The combined use of
different interview forms allowed some of Arvidsson’s “sensory, intellectual or even
quasi-religious” interactions between brands and customers to be revealed. In doing so,
the method permits a deeper understanding of the use value of brands to be developed
from the perspective of consumers, facilitating an improved understanding of branding
for marketing practitioners (Keller, 2003).
Qualitative approaches to data collection, such as the use of focus groups, depth
interviews and projective techniques, have been used in branding research by
practitioners and academics for some time. Friendship pairs, although rarely used in
academic branding research are widely used by commercial research agencies, and
autobiographical narrative interview techniques are used by sociologists and other
social scientists. However, the multi-modal two-part qualitative method that we have
described is unique in consumer branding research, and has been demonstrated to
offer gains. These include richer data generation and facilitating understanding of brand
impact on the social self without creating the types of problems foreshadowed by
Bengtsson and Ostberg (2006).
QMRIJ The text units provide strong evidence that the multi-modal two-part interviews
17,2 made it possible to generate meaningful insights into brand consumption experiences,
with particular emphasis on how the stories that are attached to brands are consumed.
Clearly, brand advertisements, just like non-commercial stories, can engender powerful
experiences. While other techniques have been used to develop understanding of actual
brand consumption, this multi-modal combination of autobiographical narrative
162 interviews and friendship pair interviews proved to be a means of understanding what
role brands (consumed in both actual and mediated forms) play in national identity. This
qualitative approach allowed for a naturalistic study of how consumers use brands for
their own national identity projects within a particular national context. It also offers
a faster, cheaper and more convenient means of gaining access to consumer
experiences of brands than traditional ethnographic methods, which require prolonged
engagements within a community. Further research using this technique is of course
needed, especially with male participants and those of different ages such as millennials,
Generations X and Y, and the elderly.
In designing this study, the expectation was that investigating how brands affect
identity would be a sensitive issue, potentially subject to social desirability biases.
The difficulties relate to how easily consumer identities (in conjunction with brand
narratives) are able to be revealed rather than difficulties in researching brands/brand
narratives per se. This proved to be the case, as evidenced by the tendency for participants
to initially underreport a range of behaviours that were of particular interest in this study.
Participants were very open to discussing actual products and services, consumption
patterns, features and benefits, pricing deals, retailer offerings and other informative
aspects of brand advertising, but it was clear that brand narratives and imagery are
sometimes scarcely registered. Brand stories constitute common mass culture that is
embedded and familiar, often consumed in an apparently perfunctory way. Furthermore,
prevailing cultural conceptions of brands mean that ads are popularly recognised simply
as persuasive commercial devices (Friestad and Wright, 1995), rather than as cultural
resources consumed as works of visual art in the manner outlined by Schroeder (2002).
However, the multi-modal method we have described provided an intensive experience
for the participant and a data-rich experience for both the researchers. The one-to-one
auto-biographical interviews provided an initial opportunity for heightened reflexivity
and memorial reconstruction while the secondary method (friendship pairs) enabled an
expansion from the individual’s reflexive, memorial and contextualised discussion about
brand narrative consumption to generate communal responses about the role that brands
play. It also enabled the researcher to probe beyond socio-political conventions and
consumer reticence concerning the impact of brands on their individual lives and on their
social interactions. Consequently, the friendship pairs elicited more narratives of brand
consumption from each other than what the researchers alone were able to achieve.
Together, the various activities stimulated memorial reconstruction and generated
co-created narratives that captured a joint, communal expression of national identity linked
to brands. National community rituals of consumption were identified. These rituals were
considered typical in New Zealand society, not as something peculiar to participants’ own
families. While food and beverage brand narratives were particularly evident in the data
(not surprisingly given that they are often consumed in communal situations), our study
also featured narratives from other brands including retailers, banks, airlines and outdoor
equipment, suggesting that national identity is experienced by consumers in narratives Multi-modal
provided by a variety of brands through their communications. enabling
This study’s methodology was designed to elaborate the role of brands in consumer’s
lives and capture the consumer experience of brands within a social context. In the spirit technique
of the brand culture perspective (Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling, 2006), particular
emphasis was placed on investigating brand consumption experiences in a meaningful
communal situation because this more fully simulates actual experiences situated in 163
social milieux. Although we do not report the details here, the research method
generated rich findings that enabled us to theorise the ways that consumers utilise brand
narratives for their own purposes, with reference to the desire to create and re-create a
sense of personal purpose and belonging within a national group (Table I).

Future research and conclusions

While the research findings regarding the multi-modal technique are based on responses
from women in a particular geo-demographic cohort in a single national market context,
this study makes no claim that the findings are generalisable to the wider population in
New Zealand or further afield; generalisations are made to theory. The technique
facilitated a deeper understanding of brand consumption, suggesting that brands,
through their ads, are used by consumers in negotiating and imagining their national
community, hinting at opportunities for brand owners and their advertising agencies
as they consider how they might be more sensitive to consumption experiences and
consumer uses of brand advertising.
The multi-modal technique led to findings which have important implications from
a strategic brand management perspective and also for governments and policy
makers as they look toward nation building exercises (and curators who support
cultural experiences and preserve national heritage). We suggest that brand owners

Multi- Friendship Orthodox

modal pair depth Projective
technique Ethnography interviews interviews techniques Surveys

Fast data collection † † † † †

Naturalistic and reduces † † †
researcher intervention
Enhances reflexive, † †
memorial and
contextualised discussion
Reduces acculturated † † †
response biases
Provides independent † † †
identity benchmark
Allows performances of † † †
social identity in context
Reveals brand † † † † †
consumption experiences
and rituals Table I.
Captures roles and use of † † † Summary of comparative
brand narratives in advantages of
context multi-modal technique
QMRIJ need to understand the use value of their brand narratives in a national context and to
17,2 leverage whatever national status they already have for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Likewise, we recommend that based on our findings so far, marketing communications
for both domestic and foreign markets should be developed with brand narratives that
are resonant and appropriate, bearing in mind the use value identified in our study.
Furthermore, we note the impact of brand narratives on a country brand, which has
164 implications for tourism and destination marketing efforts.
We have offered an original perspective on the study of brands using a qualitative
approach. Our research using this multi-modal enabling technique has found that
brands are potentially more powerful resources than previously imagined. The
richness of the data generated using these methods has the potential to assist consumer
researchers who are focused on the models or mechanisms through which branding
makes an influence. The method we describe might be adapted for use in future
consumer research and studies of brands as cultural resources. Advances in the field of
branding will come from such studies of brand narrative consumption uncoupled from
the ideas of target audiences and irrespective of consumer purchase intentions and
actual usage/consumption. As practitioners understand more about the role that
brands and their narratives play in the lives of consumers and communities, they will
be better placed to harness the valuable asset that is their brand.

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About the authors
Sandy Bulmer is a Senior Lecturer in marketing at Massey University. Her research interests are 167
at the intersection of marketing communication and consumer research, with a focus on brands.
Sandy Bulmer is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: s.l.bulmer@massey.ac.nz
Margo Buchanan-Oliver is a Professor of marketing and Co-Director of the Centre of Digital
Enterprise (CODE) at the University of Auckland Business School. Her research concerns
consumption discourse and practice.

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