Fuzzy promises

Abstract

This article clarifies the commonplace assumption that brands make promises by developing definitions of brand promise delivery. Distinguishing between clear and fuzzy brand promises, we develop definitions of what it is for a brand to deliver on fuzzy functional, symbolic, and experiential promises. We argue (a) that brands deliver fuzzy functional promises through encouraging and facilitating courses of actions that are conducive to the promised functionality; whereas (b) brands deliver fuzzy symbolic promises through encouraging and facilitating ways in which consumers can use brands as narrative material to communicate self-identity. Finally, (c) we propose that brands deliver fuzzy experiential promises through effectively motivating consumers to adopt and play a social role implicitly suggested and facilitated by the brand. A promise is an inherently ethical concept and the article concludes with an in-depth discussion of fuzzy brand promises as two-way ethical commitments that put requirements on both brands and consumers.

Keywords

Brand as process brand ethics brand promise co-creation consumer-brand interaction service dominant logic

Introduction

‘Frankly, a brand is a promise. And promises are meant to be kept’ (Pearson, 2006: 385).

‘Based on the principle of a brand being a promise, and all of us knowing very well how hard it hurts when a promise is broken, and how, commercially, it is relatively easy to walk away if that happens. The short-form definition of brand management I developed 20 years ago still holds true — Make a Promise, Keep a Promise’ (Ryder, 2007: 87–8).

Levitt (1981) has argued that the notion of ‘promise’ underscores all that is marketing, because marketing offerings are essentially just promises until consumers have bought, used and experienced the offerings. Recently, the promise concept has moved centre stage in research into relationship and service marketing (Berry, 2000; Bitner, 1995; Calonius, 2006; Grönroos, 1990, 1996, 2006a, 2006b) and in those strands of brand research inspired by the underlying service dominant logic as described by Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2006) (Balmer, 2001a, 2001b; Balmer and Grey, 2003; Brodie, 2009; Brodie et al., 2006; de Chernatony, 2006, 2009; Merz et al., 2009). The conceptual nature of ‘promise’ suggests why the concept has become so central in research within the framework of the service dominant logic focusing as it does on the relations and commitments between marketers and consumers as dialogical partners (Ballantyne, 2004; Finne and Grönroos, 2009): a promise is a relational action entailing the communication of intentions to bring about a future state of affairs beneficial to the one to whom the promise is made (see the section ‘The promise concept’ for an elaborate discussion).

Despite the widespread consensus on thinking of brands as making promises, it is by no means theoretically clear what we mean when we say that a brand makes a promise. The aim of this article is to provide a better understanding of the important concept of brand promises by developing definitions of what it is for a brand to deliver on a promise as well as discussing the underlying ethical nature of brand promises. The article includes an appendix comprising a conceptual flow chart model (Figure 2) and a table featuring definitions of all main concepts and principles employed throughout the article (Table 1).

When developing definitions, one can aim at obtaining (a) extensional adequacy (no actual counter-examples to the definition); (b) intensional adequacy (no possible counter-examples to the definition); or c) sense adequacy (imparting meaning on the definiendum while at the same time encapsulating core aspects of actual meaning ascribed to the definiendum) (Gupta, 2008). Descriptive definitions aim at producing a limited set of true or justified descriptions that summarize what the definiendum actually is. By contrast, explicative definitions aim at endowing relevant meaning to the definiendum in order to better understand the phenomenon explored, and thus produce stipulations of what the definiendum could be. Descriptive definitions are usually proposed when a field of research has reached a mature stage displaying a high degree of conceptual and theoretical consensus, whereas explicative definitions are more appropriate in nascent scientific fields displaying a relatively high degree of conceptual indeterminacy and ambiguity. Accordingly, descriptive definitions aim at obtaining extensional or intensional adequacy, whereas explicative definitions aim at sense adequacy (Gupta, 2008). Assuming that the notion of brand promise delivery is central to contemporary research in branding and that the notion of brand per se is significantly indeterminate (Stern, 2006), we aim at developing sense adequate explicative definitions in order to provide a conceptual framework from which future descriptive definitions can be progressed.

The idea that brands make promises has substantial grounding in Stern’s (2006) historical, semantic analysis of the varying meanings that have been attributed over time to the term ‘brand’. To analyse the evolution of the meaning of ‘brand’, Stern introduces a semantic scheme based on a quadripartite set of brand dichotomies: literal/metaphoric meanings, entity/process functions, physical/mental locus, positive/negative valence. Crucially, her analysis demonstrates that metaphorical meanings of ‘brand’ are predominantly positive in valence and cover usages such as ‘brand reputation’, ‘brand image’ and ‘brand commitment’. Though Stern does not explicitly mention `brand as promise', the concept of `brand commitment' with positive valence is likely to be the historical, semantic root from which the currently central concept of `brand as promise' has evolved. Both concepts communicate to a person or a group of persons an intention to bring about a future state of affairs beneficial to that person or group of persons. (The conceptual affinity between commitment and promise is further described in the opening of the section ‘The promise concept’.)

Generic definition of fuzzy promise delivery

In what follows, we introduce a distinction between clear and fuzzy promises and, based on recent consumer-brand research, suggest three overall types of fuzzy promises (functional, symbolic and experiential), which also resonate with prior managerially oriented brand research specifying different types of brand concepts (e.g. Park et al., 1986). Clear brand promises assert a relation between some future state of affairs and the correct application of the brand. A mobile phone brand promising to enable the consumer to navigate in all capitals of Europe delivers on its promise insofar as the GPS application in the phone actually enables the averagely competent user to navigate in the capitals of Europe. Thus, the brand delivers the promise in its capacity of being a certain entity with specific features or properties and, therefore, grounds a one-way commitment in the sense that the brand is fully obligated to deliver the promise provided the consumer uses the brand in appropriate ways.

By contrast, promises like ‘this brand of cereal improves health’ or ‘this brand of laptop facilitates creativity’ are fuzzy. Like clear promises, fuzzy promises assert a relation between some future state of affairs (e.g. health, creativity) and a condition that relates to the brand, but it is not clear what that condition is, only that it requires far more than averagely skilled application of the brand. Recent research in public health branding indicates that brands can play a crucial role in motivating and empowering citizens to adopt healthier lifestyles (Evans and Hastings, 2008a; Evans et al., 2008), encouraging the belief that brands can meaningfully make and deliver fuzzy promises. When brands promise to be instrumental in bringing about a complex human phenomenon (e.g. health), the commitment of delivery thereby grounded by the promise must be a two-way one: the complexity of the promised state of affairs requires consumer-brand interaction that goes way beyond competent use of the brand (i.e. health is a complex function of balanced diet, exercise, meaningful social relations and mental well-being (Blaxter, 1990, 2010)) and cannot be reduced to, say, eating a wholesome bowl of nutritious cereals. These reflections motivate our generic definition¹ of fuzzy brand promise delivery: a brand delivers on a fuzzy promise to the extent that the brand universe facilitates and encourages a form of consumer-brand interaction, which – if adopted by the target consumer – brings about the promised future state of affairs.

Service logic foundations

The generic definition of fuzzy brand promise delivery stated above encapsulates fundamental insights into value co-creation described in recent service marketing literature (Berry, 2000; Bitner, 1995; Brodie et al., 2011; Grönroos, 1990, 1996, 2006a, 2006b; Peñaloza and Mish, 2011; Prahalad, 2004; Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2006). Grönroos (2006: 319, 324) says:

Services emerge in ‘open’ processes where the customers participate as co-producers and hence can be directly influenced by the progress of these processes. Traditionally, physical goods are produced in ‘closed’ production processes where the customer only perceives the goods as outcomes of the process.

Service marketing, therefore, is to invite customers to use the service processes by making promises about value that can be expected to be captured from the service, and to implement these processes in a way that allows customers to perceive that value is created in their processes (promise keeping through value fulfilment).

The core idea of the generic definition of fuzzy brand promise delivery – i.e. that a brand delivers a fuzzy promise by encouraging and enabling consumers to interact with the brand in particular ways indicated by the brand universe – resonates with the idea put forward in the quotes that service marketing makes promises about expected value and implements processes that allow for the promise to be delivered through value co-creation. The affinity between fuzzy promises and service marketing goes even deeper: Grönroos (2006: 323) defines a service as process activities taking place in interactions between the consumer and material (e.g. people or goods) and/or immaterial (e.g. systems and infrastructures) entities representing the service provider in order to solve consumers’ needs and problems. Now, in order for a brand to deliver on a fuzzy promise it has to encourage and enable a complex series of actions which, given Grönroos’s definition of a service paraphrased above, can be defined as a service function. To illustrate: if, say, a brand of breakfast cereals will deliver on a fuzzy promise to promote consumers’ health, the brand has to establish a set of process activities such as encouraging behavioural change through marketing communications and then enable the process of behavioural change by providing assistance, e.g. through healthy living workshops, healthy recipes, food diaries, nutrition advice and emotional support via an online community.

But how, then, are fuzzy brand promises distinct from service marketing promises? Despite the structural similarities, some might highlight an ontological difference in the sense that service brand promises are necessarily attached to immaterial offerings (i.e. services) whereas fuzzy promises can be attached to material offerings (i.e. physical goods). This line of reasoning, however, is challenged by Gummesson (1995: 250–1), who argues that the distinction between tangible products and intangible services has collapsed, because ‘customers do not buy goods or services: they buy offerings which render services which create value’. The feeling that a binary logic viewing marketing offerings as either tangible goods or intangible services is no longer applicable is further reinforced by Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2006), who frame the evolvement of physical goods into services as a paradigmatic shift in marketing that applies to all marketing offerings, whether in the form of tangibles or intangibles, material or immaterial entities.

Here is not the place to settle the conceptual discussion of whether the distinction between intangible services and tangible products is no longer in place; the importance of looking into the service logic foundations of fuzzy brand promises is to highlight that fuzzy promises have a service like structure also when the entity around which the brand universe revolves is a tangible, physical good such as trainers, breakfast cereals or dental floss. Also, the analysis of the service logic foundations of fuzzy brand promises enables a better understanding of our later discussion of brand promises as two-way ethical commitments, because it relies on a recent service brand promise model suggested by Brodie et al. (2006).

Functional, symbolic and experiential fuzzy promises

This article builds on the tacit assumption that brands do indeed make functional, symbolic and experiential promises. This assumption is justified by the fact that the distinction between functional, symbolic and experiential brands plays an important role in brand building and brand management (e.g. de Chernatony, 2006; Keller, 2008; Park et al., 1986). However, to further strengthen our conceptual foundation we will provide an independent rationale that these specific types of brands evolve into corresponding brand promises by demonstrating that consumer-brand relationship research suggests that consumers engage with brands as relationship partners (Aggarwal, 2004); that is, that they expect brands to provide functional, symbolic and experiential benefits. Many consumers engage with brands on other grounds than that they are such and such particular entities (Stern, 2006) that express a given value of utility (Firat and Schultz, II, 1997). In fact, a large number of contemporary consumers engage with brands, because they enable some form of reciprocal exchange, which again facilitates social relationships that can constitute personal meaning by providing a range of different consumer benefits (Fournier, 1998; Park et al., 2010).

In accordance with Valoutsou and Moutinho’s (2008) observation that early relationship marketing literature often focused on brands as transaction facilitators rather than relationship builders, one can plausibly hold that the principal contribution of first generation consumer-brand relationship research (e.g. Fournier’s seminal article ‘Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research’ (1998)) was to establish and justify the existence of complex emotional consumer-brand relationships and provide a conceptual and theoretical framework from which future consumer-brand relationship theory could progress. Contemporary second-generation consumer-brand relationship research – as well as research into brand attachment (Grisaffe and Nguyen, 2010; Park et al., 2010) – accepts as a baseline condition the existence and relevance of complex emotional consumer-brand relationships and, therefore, investigates the nature, extension, interrelation and consumer benefits of those relationships through in-depth explorations of particular topics.

First, Evans et al. (2008) demonstrate that many people engage with brands as a form of lifestyle coaches that inspire and motivate them to adopt healthier lifestyles and, based on Kristensen et al. (2010), one can add that brands constitute a moral discourse that helps people maintain behavioural changes by inducing a feeling of guilt if they fail to sustain their new behaviour. Thus, though the consumer-brand relationship in this respect has only little to do with the functional utility of brand properties, brands have a kind of meta-functional dimension in that consumers interpret brands as promising a benefit that is instrumental (i.e. functional) in facilitating lifestyle changes. Second, building on the fundamental insight that consumers not only understand brands as entities with specific functional properties (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998), Escalas and Bettman (2003, 2005) demonstrate that consumers use brands to obtain symbolic benefits such as construction (Askegaard et al., 2002) and expression (Elliot and Wattanasuwan, 1998) of one’s self (Schembri et al., 2010). Third, brand communities offer consumers a wide variety of benefits (Fournier and Lee, 2009; Schau et al., 2009), in particular emotional and moral support (Leigh et al., 2006; McAlexander et al., 2002; Mathwick et al., 2008; Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001) as well as a strong sense of social belonging (McAlexander et al., 2002; Muñiz and Schau, 2005; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995), i.e. benefits that enhance the consumer’s emotional experiences.

Thus, consistent with findings in contemporary consumer-brand relationship literature, we assume (a) that brands raise consumer expectations of experiential, symbolic and functional benefits, and – given that an integral part of promise making is to raise expectations of future actions or states of affairs (Calonius, 2006; Cowie, 1989; Grönroos, 1990, 2006a, 2006b; Searle, 1977) – we further assume (b) that we are justified in claiming that brands can and do make functional, symbolic and experiential promises.

The promise concept

What exactly is a promise? According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Cowie, 1989), the most basic meaning of making a promise is to assure somebody that one will do or not do something. To assure somebody is, again, defined as causing somebody to feel certain about something. On inference, to make a promise is to raise somebody’s expectations that one will do or not do something and to communicate a personal commitment that one actually will act in accordance with the expectations raised. In what follows, we will briefly outline two distinct philosophical approaches to promise making and, as will become apparent, we will follow the account that is in keeping with the lexical definition of promise making described above.

The American philosopher Austin (1971) developed a theory of speech acts that introduces a distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts, providing a helpful platform for defining the promise concept. Illocutionary speech acts are successful to the extent that they meet certain communicative conventions or correspond with social practice. As an example, if A under certain circumstances (e.g. on hearing the alarm) rushes into the office and yells ‘fire’, it is likely that the people in the office will recognize his communicative intention as a warning. What makes the utterance ‘fire’ a warning is the fact that the utterance matches social practice and conventions, which guide the audience to interpret the utterance in a certain way. Thus, warnings are examples of illocutionary speech acts. Perlocutionary speech acts are successful to the extent that they produce a certain effect in the audience. Consider, for example, the communicative act of persuading. Think again of the person who rushes into the office to warn about the fire. He is only successful in persuading the people in the office to leave the building to the extent that he produces a certain effect in his audience, i.e. a motivation to get going. The distinction between perlocutions and illocutions reflects the crucial difference between conventional and expectational accounts of promising (Habib, 2008: s. 5.3). As indicated by the name, conventional accounts explain promise making and promissory obligations in terms of conventions, customs and practices. In contrast, expectational accounts do so in terms of the expectations that promises produce in the promisee (Habib, 2008).

Austin (1971) thinks of promises as illocutions whose meaning is determined by social practice and conventions of agreement making. Yet since the focal point in our context is the effect that brand promises tend to produce in consumers, we suggest thinking of promises as perlocutions and dealing with brand promises along the lines of expectational accounts of promising. Correspondingly, in the final section on the ethical status of brand promises, we use Scanlon’s (1990, 2000) expectationalist account of promising as a rationale for discussing the ethical dimension of fuzzy promise delivery.

Given these considerations, we define a promise as a perlocutionary communicative act that comprises an intentional and a causal element. Thus, A makes a promise to B whenever it is the case that A communicates to B the intention to carry out an action – desirable for B – and at the same time produces the expectation that A will carry out the promised action. This definition fits nicely with Calonius (2006), whose seminal work from the 1980s on the foundations of a ‘promise view’ of marketing has greatly influenced recent developments on the promise concept (e.g. Bitner, 1995; Brodie, 2009; Brodie et al., 2006; Grönroos, 1990, 2006a, 2006b). Calonious’s definition suggests:

Promise is a more or less explicitly expressed conditional declaration or assurance made to another party, or to oneself, with respect to the future, stating that one will do or refrain from some specified act, or that one will give or bestow some specified thing. The action or intentional inactivity called forth by a promise, or a set or bundle of interrelated promises, will occur with some probability in the near or more distant future, and last over a shorter or longer period of time. (2006: 422)

The brand concept

There is no standard definition of what a brand is, but the following elements seem to be fundamental. First, a key feature of a brand is that it is a set of symbolic values that differentiates a product, service, person or place from other functionally equivalent entities (de Chernatony, 2006, 2009; de Chernatony and McDonald, 2003; Keller, 2008). Second, a brand triggers associations (Tybout and Calkins, 2005) that unify the symbolic values in an external ideal (Evans and Hastings, 2008b). Third, a brand makes a promise, typically one or more of the following three types of promises: functional, symbolic, and experiential (Park et al., 1986). In this way, we hold a typical brand: (a) to be a set of symbolic values, which forms a chain of associations to external ideals in the mind of consumers; and (b) to make a functional, symbolic, or experiential brand promise.

Our general understanding of the three different types of brand promises draws on Park et al. (1986), who categorized brands as functional, symbolic, experiential, or a mixture of these three types. (Crucial contemporary work, like Keller (2008), has adapted the distinction.) Functional brands, or brands with a functional concept, are designed ‘to solve externally generated consumption needs’ (Park et al., 1986: 136). Functional brands are task oriented in the sense that they promise to solve or prevent a problem or to enable the consumer to more effectively carry out a specific undertaking. Take a yoghurt brand as an example. If a brand manager chooses to highlight the positive impact on digestion, yoghurt may be positioned as a functional brand. Symbolic brands are designed to ‘fulfill internally generated needs for self-enhancement, role position, group membership, or ego-identification’ (Park et al., 1986: 136–7). Symbolic brands are identity oriented, as they promise to associate the consumer with a desirable self-image or social group. Now think again of a yoghurt brand; if the brand manager chooses to position his or her brand on values such as healthy living and empowerment, the yoghurt brand will have a symbolic concept. Experiential brands are designed to satisfy ‘internally generated needs for stimulation and/or variety’ (Park et al., 1986: 137). Experiential brands are sensory oriented in that they promise to engender pleasurable feelings or mental states. To finish off our yoghurt brand example, the brand manager can choose to position his or her product on its superior taste, and thus provide the brand with an experiential concept. Each type of brand makes a type-specific promise, that is, a functional, symbolic or an experiential one. In reality, most brands make various promises that cut across the distinction. For the sake of theoretical clarity we keep it simple and limit our focus to fuzzy promises that are purely functional, symbolic, or experiential.

Delivering fuzzy promises

The previous section has introduced the distinction between functional, symbolic, and experiential brands. In this section, we develop definitions of what it is for each type of brand to deliver on its type-specific brand promise.

Functional promises

An intuitive idea is that a brand delivers on its functional promise if the brand can perform the task or has the functional feature(s), which it reasonably can be said to promise. If a shampoo brand, for instance, promises to remove greasiness and enhance shine, the brand simply delivers on that promise if, when used in an appropriate manner under normal circumstances, the hair is left shinier and less greasy. This idea accounts reasonably well for clear functional promises, but has little explanatory power with regard to fuzzy functional promises. They are conditional on another type of brand interaction. We propose that in order for a brand to deliver a fuzzy functional promise, it is necessary to facilitate consumer-brand interaction in the sense that the brand must encourage certain patterns of consumption and the consumer must be willing to adopt the suggested patterns of consumption. To exemplify, let us focus on Kellogg’s breakfast cereal brand Special K, which promises ‘improved health’; and Apple’s MacBook laptop range, which promises ‘greater creative freedom’.²

Functional properties such as ‘creativity’ or ‘health’ do not emerge as immediate results of using a brand. Just booting up your new MacBook does not release your creative potential, nor does eating Special K for breakfast make you healthy. But if the brands encourage patterns of consumption that, if followed by the targeted consumers, bring about the promised functionality, then the brands deliver on their fuzzy functional promises. Thus, if the MacBook brand encourages its users to adopt courses of action that are supportive of creative writing and photo-editing, and if the average consumer is likely to improve his or her creative skills upon following the encouraged courses of actions, then the brand delivers on its promise. Likewise, if consumers, encouraged by Special K, would adopt certain types of action specifically designed to improve the targeted consumers’ health, and if doing so would be conducive to the targeted consumers’ health, then the brand delivers on its health promise. Along this line of reasoning, we hold that:

A brand delivers on a fuzzy functional promise to the extent that the brand universe facilitates and encourages certain patterns of consumption, which – if adopted by the target consumers – bring about the promised functionality.

Symbolic promises

Consumers use symbolic brands to communicate personal identity (e.g. Allen et al., 2008; Askegaard et al., 2002; Elliot and Wattanasuwan, 1998; Fournier, 1998; Schembri et al., 2010). Park et al. (1986: 136) define symbolic brands as constructs ‘designed to associate the individual with a desired group, role, or self-image’. Accordingly, a symbolic brand promise assures the consumer that he or she will be associated with a desirable group, role, or self-image.

To deliver a symbolic promise, the brand must trigger associations in the mind of the consumer as well as other consumers. If a symbolic brand does not influence the consumer to associate him/herself with a desired self-image or social position, then it does not add a symbolic benefit to his or her life and, accordingly, the brand does not deliver on its promise. Furthermore, if the brand does not influence other consumers to associate the brand user with the desired self-image and social position, it also fails to add value in the sense that it was meant to. Against this background, we hold that in order for a brand to deliver on a symbolic promise two forms of consumer-brand interaction must take place. (1) subjective brand interaction: the brand user must associate him/herself with a desired self-image or social position by means of using the brand to express personal values, attitudes, and beliefs; (2) intersubjective brand interaction: as a response to the brand user’s attempt to express his or her personal identity by means of the brand, other consumers should associate him or her with a desired self-image or social position.

Thus, symbolic promise fulfilment is an interactive social process in which the brand must encourage consumers to use brands as vehicles to express desired self-images and social positions, and consumers must be willing to use and interpret brands as ways of communicating personal values, attitudes, and beliefs. Based on these reflections, we arrive at the following definition:

A brand delivers on a fuzzy symbolic promise to the extent that (a) the brand facilitates and encourages ways in which the consumer, C, can interact with the brand in order to communicate personal identity; and (b) the proposed consumer-brand interaction influences C and other consumers to associate C with a desired self-image or social position.

Let us look at a prototypical symbolic brand. Nike promises to associate consumers with personal empowerment, which breaks down into sub-values such as willpower, self control, confidence, drive, courage, individuality, and resolution. Nike’s brand promise is captured in the ‘Just do it’ slogan. The brand delivers on its symbolic promise to empower the consumer to the degree that two conditions are met: (a) the consumer – when following the brand’s implicit encouragement to use the brand to communicate personal identity – associates him/herself with empowerment (e.g. will-power and self-control); (b) other consumers, as a response to the consumer using the brand to communicate personal identity, associate him or her with empowerment.

The scope of the definition is important. Not even the coolest brand on planet earth could possibly associate every user with coolness. The latest iPhone might associate a student with an innovative, urban attitude, whereas the very same gadget would take the mickey out of the elderly professor by making him look totally anachronistic. Brands are, of course, only responsible for delivering promises to their core target group. We go into greater detail with this issue in the discussion of ethical implications.

Experiential promises

According to Park et al. (1986: 136) experiential brands are designed to satisfy ‘experiential needs … for products that provide sensory pleasure, variety, and/or cognitive stimulation’. This indicates that experiential promises can be either clear or fuzzy. For instance a brand of chocolate that promises ‘taste experience’ is best understood as making a clear promise, because the brand as entity can deliver the promise: the consumption of the chocolate is likely to bring about the promised taste experience. Likewise, experiential promises to deliver such things as entertainment, excitement, or thrill can be instances of clear promises that are delivered through product inherent features (e.g. a thrilling movie, an exciting amusement park). However, some brands deliver promised consumer experiences through more extended forms of consumer-brand interaction rather than through an immediate causal consequence of product inherent properties and, therefore, are fuzzy.

As an example, Happy Meal, McDonalds’ iconic experiential brand that promises a fun and exciting food experience, does not deliver, or does not solely deliver, on its experiential promise in terms of product inherent features. It is not only the burger and the fries that account for the experience. When a child enjoys a Happy Meal with his or her family in one of McDonalds’ family restaurants, the context of consumption plays an important role: Happy Meal delivers the promised brand experience through, for example, free balloons, the presence of the clownish Ronald McDonald character (in flesh and blood or plastic), an activity room, background music and other sorts of devices. In short, the brand experience is substantially contingent on the context of consumption.

Chandler and Vargo (2011) argue that consumer co-creation of brand value takes place against a background of one or more of three different levels of contexts (i.e. micro, meso, and macro contexts), which implies that not just experiential but also functional and symbolic promises are fundamentally context dependent. However, across the three types of brand promises there is a difference in the degree to which the managerially controlled context of consumption is incremental to delivering the brand promise, and brands such as Happy Meal highlight the particular importance of managerially constructed contexts of consumption in delivering fuzzy experiential promises. What is more, an experiential brand can only deliver a fuzzy promise if the consumer is willing to interact with the brand and play certain social roles implicitly facilitated and encouraged by the managerially constructed brand context.

Thus, for Happy Meal to deliver on its promise to give families a fun experience, it is necessary that parents are willing to play a social role that enables the brand to deliver. Parents must take time to help the children assemble the toys in the box, accept that playing and eating are not separable in this context, give children time to colour in the pictures on the box and have a go on the slide, and not rush out of the door before Ronald McDonald has had a chance to hand out some free balloons. Against this backdrop, we suggest the following definition of experiential brand promise delivery:

A brand delivers on a fuzzy experiential promise to the extent that (a) the consumer willingly plays a social role in the brand universe implicitly facilitated and suggested by the brand and its context; and (b) this interaction brings about the promised experience.

All three definitions revolve around the underlying concept of consumer-brand interaction and, as will be discussed in the next section, they put a considerable number of requirements on the consumer. Accordingly, one might find the definitions unbalanced, objecting that the consumer has to make a disproportionate relational investment in the brands in order to expect promises to be delivered. The reason why this apparent imbalance appears is that brands deliver fuzzy promises through social processes, i.e. consumer-brand interaction, whereas brands deliver clear ones in their capacity of being tangible or intangible products having certain features. Thus, the consumer is necessarily much more active in the process of delivering fuzzy promises. This being said, however, it is critical to stress that fuzzy brand promise delivery is conditional on brand performance: this is captured in the definitions by stating that brands have to facilitate the relevant sort of consumer-brand interaction needed to deliver the promise. The next section discusses the ethical challenges that emerge when consumers interact with brands as co-creators of the brand promise.

The ethical dimension of fuzzy promises

Expectationalism

In ethical theory as well as in commonsense morality, it is a widely held belief that promises ought to be kept (Habib, 2008). Most work on the ethical status of promises has been carried out along the lines of the predominant ethical theories (e.g. virtue ethics, contractualism, consequentialism, and deontology). Yet, a stream of ethical theory, promissory theory, has been developed to specifically address the ethical nature of promises. Promissory theory comes in two main variants. On the one hand, there are theories that explain promissory obligations in terms of conventions, customs, and practices (conventionalism). On the other, there are theories that do so in terms of the expectations that a promise produces in the promisee (expectationalism) (Habib, 2008).

According to Scanlon’s (1990, 2000) expectationalist account of promises, making a promise grounds an ethical obligation to fulfil the promise. If A communicates to B the intention to perform a desirable action, and if A at the same time produces the expectation that he or she will carry out the promised action, then A is ethically obliged to act accordingly (1990, 2000: 295–327). The underlying principle is that intentional creation of positive expectations creates an ethical obligation to deliver on the expectations. We are operating from the assumption (justified by reference to contemporary consumer-brand relationship research) that fuzzy brand promises raise functional, symbolic, and experiential benefit expectations. On the expectationalist account of promissory theory this means that fuzzy brand promises ought to be dealt with as ethical commitments. Accordingly, the aim of this section is to address the ethical dimension of fuzzy brand promise delivery.

On a straightforward interpretation of the expectationalist account of promissory theory, a brand that, say, through external marketing communications intentionally raises consumer expectations of symbolic benefits, has an ethical commitment to deliver the expected benefit, because of the expectations raised. However, we are in need of a more complex reading of expectationalism, because the consumer is a co-creator of brand benefits, and thus has to be viewed as co-delivering the brand promise. To account for this complexity, we will now describe fuzzy brand promises as two-way ethical commitments.

Two-way ethical commitments

Based on the promise marketing framework developed by Calonius (1986) and elaborated by Bitner (1995) and Grönroos (1996), Brodie et al. (2006) have developed a service brand promise model, having as its cornerstone consumer-brand interactions. Central to the model are three marketing processes: (1) promise making in the form of external marketing (e.g. advertising, sales, promotions, PR) between the organization and consumers regarding what consumers can expect (Bitner, 1995); (2) enabling and facilitating promises by deploying or building skills, abilities, tools, and motivation (Bitner, 1995), which is conceived of as internal marketing between the organization and its employees (Berry, 1995); (3) keeping or delivering promises through interactive marketing in real-time encounters between the service organization and its consumers when the service is produced and/or consumed (Bitner, 1995). External, internal, and interactive marketing not only differ in their content, they represent three different types of processes. External marketing is a non-relational, one-way communication process from a brand to its consumers. Internal and interactive marketing are both relational processes: internal marketing consists of a set of organizational interactions aimed at setting a scene within which a given type of consumer action is encouraged and facilitated in order to enable consumer co-creation of brand benefits; interactive marketing consists of consumer-brand interactions initiated by consumers as a response to the internal marketing processes. The material moment of consumer co-creation takes place whenever a consumer’s response to the internal marketing processes – encouraged and facilitated by the brand – actually delivers the brand promise (interactive marketing). Featuring a brand promise triangle introduced by Brodie (2009) and Brodie et al. (2006), Figure 1 illustrates the interplay between the three marketing processes.

Figure 1.

Brand promise triangle as introduced by Brodie (2009) and Brodie et al. (2006).

In our context, the main contribution of the brand promise triangle is that it demonstrates that the concepts of and interplay between internal and interactive marketing suggest that delivering brand promises is dependent on two conditions. The first condition is that the organization understands (a) the fact that a promise has been made to consumers; and (b) that the promise can only be delivered if the employees and other of the organization’s representatives enable and facilitate social relations that provide consumer value should the consumer choose to interact. The second condition is that consumers need to accept the invitation to interact and actually get involved in the social relations suggested and facilitated by the brand universe in order to experience consumer value related to the brand promise. Thus, in its most essential form, what the brand promise triangle brings to this article is the notion of brand promise delivery as a two-way commitment that requires investment and involvement on both sides of the company–consumer split. Assuming fuzzy brand promises to be two-way commitments of consumer-brand interaction, we suggest the following conditions to be key features in a future theory of ethical responsibility for fuzzy brand promise delivery:

Brand requirement

If a brand makes a fuzzy promise to a consumer and thereby intentionally raises expectations of functional, symbolic, or experiential benefits, the brand is ethically obligated to facilitate delivery in such a way that the promised benefit is likely to be the case in the near future should the consumer decide to interact with the brand in appropriate ways suggested by the brand universe.

Consumer requirement

A consumer can only hold a brand ethically responsible for failing to deliver a fuzzy promise if (a) he or she interacts with the brand in ways suggested by the brand that are conducive to delivering the promised benefit; and (b) this interaction is insufficient to bring about the promised benefit within a foreseeable future.

Assume that a brand, say a retail brand such as Tesco, makes a fuzzy promise to help consumers reduce their carbon footprint by 50% by 2020. Given the ethical conditions stated above, the retail brand is responsible for establishing a platform that (a) specifies appropriate actions that can be taken in order to reduce individuals’ carbon footprint (e.g. buying eco friendly products, insulating one’s home, eating seasonal fruits and vegetables, recycling and reducing waste, using public transportation); (b) encourages consumers to change behaviour (e.g. through marketing communications, price promotions on eco-friendly products, and loyalty schemes promoting green choices); (c) supports the consumer in doing the suggested actions by making available appropriate tools, advice, and methods (e.g. green driving guide, stocking a good variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables, advice on how to save energy in the home, ideas for vintage (second-hand buying).

To deliver their end of the bargain, consumers must be willing to interact with the brand by (a) following suggestions proposed by the brand for actions that can be taken in order to make the promised future state of affairs come true; (b) making use of tools, advice, and methods (e.g. adhering to the green driving guide, following advice on how to save energy in the home, buying second-hand furniture) made available by the brand in order to facilitate the promised benefit.

The sub-conditions just described, as well as the consumer and brand requirements from which they are inferred, are subject to a criterion of appropriateness: in relation to a fuzzy promise such as that of reducing individuals’ carbon footprints it is easy to suggest extreme ways that would deliver the promise (e.g. going off the grid and producing one’s own electricity via solar panels, being self-supplied with vegetables, and only buying second-hand clothing). But the brand has to suggest, encourage, and support a course of action that is reasonable, well-balanced … appropriate. We define appropriateness as follows.

Criterion of appropriateness

A suggestion for consumer-brand interaction in order to enable the consumer to co-deliver a brand promise is appropriate insofar as (a) the interaction or sets of interactions are likely to be sufficient to bring about the promised benefit within a reasonable amount of time; and (b) the suggested investment of consumer resources (e.g. time, money, energy, ego-positioning) is proportional to the promised benefit.

The first clause, (a), expresses a causal condition,³ while the second clause, (b), expresses a normative one. The normative condition, which is the one of interest in this context, has at its core the principle of proportionality, which is an ethical (Quill et al., 1997) and legal principle (Alexy, 2002, 2003; Franck, 2010; Kumm, 2010; Nolte, 2010; Veel, 2010) regulating the exercise of power that a legal subject (e.g. a nation state or business) has over one or more legal subjects (e.g. citizens or consumers). Inspired by the principle of proportionality in law as discussed by Alexy (2002, 2003), we hold a line of consumer-brand interaction suggested by a brand to be proportionate to the extent that the suggestion (a) is fit to achieve the promised benefit (this is the sub-principle of suitability); and (b) does not exceed that which is necessary to achieve the promised benefit (this is the sub-principle of necessity). Both sub-principles are principles of optimization in the sense that they require something to be done to the greatest extent possible without causing harm or frustrating other equally or more important principles (Alexy, 2002; 2003). The principle of suitability protects consumers by putting businesses under an ethical obligation to refrain from suggesting courses of consumer-brand interactions that probably cannot lead to the realization of the promised benefit without causing harm to the consumer or frustrating other ethical principles. The principle of necessity requires businesses to suggest a course of consumer-brand interaction that interferes less intensively with the life of the interacting consumers, seeing that two or more courses of consumer-brand action are equally suitable.

Although this article is the first to explicitly define the criterion of appropriateness in brand-consumer relationships, Fyrberg and Jüriado’s (2009) refinement of Brodie et al.’s (2006) brand promise triangle implicitly stresses the importance of the criterion by demonstrating that negotiating power imbalances between the brand and the consumer is a critical prerequisite to co-deliver brand promises.

Ethical implications

This article has highlighted joint responsibility for delivering fuzzy brand promises through consumer-brand interaction. This raises important ethical implications for both consumers and businesses. On the one hand, consumers have to be aware that in order for a brand to deliver on a fuzzy promise, they are required to get involved with the brand in ways that – although meeting the criterion of appropriateness – can be potentially very demanding. If, for instance, a consumer chooses to opt in to Tesco’s promise to reduce consumers’ carbon footprint by 50% by 2020, it might mean that he or she has to adopt quite demanding behavioural changes, such as drive less and drive differently (eco-safe driving), stop eating imported fruit and vegetables, invest in home improvements, and buy second-hand clothing and furniture. Thus, a very important practical implication is that consumers have to be aware of the high-level personal involvement required of them if a brand is to be ethically responsible for delivering on the consumer benefit expectations intentionally raised by making the promise.

On the other hand, businesses have to be aware that fuzzy promises are promises of expected benefits, the delivery of which they are ethically required to enable through appropriate consumer-brand interactions. As mentioned, it is well established in the service brand literature that consumers are co-creators of brand benefits (e.g. Brodie, 2009; Brodie et al., 2006). Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2006) have convincingly described the collapse of the distinction between product oriented and service oriented marketing by demonstrating that over a span of approximately 200 years marketing of tangible goods has gradually adopted a service marketing logic inherently relying on consumer co-creation. This article further justifies the structural shift towards a service dominant logic in marketing by arguing that delivering fuzzy promises – whether attached to tangible or intangible brands – requires consumer co-creation. But the article also provides an independent contribution to the understanding of the service dominant logic by arguing that making a fuzzy promise attached to a tangible brand grounds a corporate moral obligation to adopt a service dominant logic in order to enable consumer-brand co-delivery of the promise. Thus, where Vargo and Lusch’s description of the service dominant logic provides a value-neutral description of the collapse of the distinction between goods and service marketing, this article demonstrates the adoption of a service dominant logic to be a normative requirement when making fuzzy promises, whether attached to tangible or intangible brands.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to provide a better understanding of what it is for a brand to deliver on a promise. Distinguishing on the one hand between clear and fuzzy brand promises, and on the other, between functional, symbolic, and experiential promises, our aim was to develop a generic definition of fuzzy brand promise delivery as well as specialized definitions of fuzzy functional, symbolic, and experiential brand promise delivery.

Building on the notion of consumers as co-creators of brand promise benefits, the overall contribution of the definitions is to issue qualified stipulations of what general type of interaction brands are required to enable and consumers are required to accept in order for a brand to deliver a fuzzy promise. We argued that functional promises require brands to suggest and enable, and consumers to accept and adopt, a certain course of action that is conducive to the promised functional benefit. Next, we argued that symbolic promises require brands to encourage and enable consumers to use brands as vehicles to express personal identity, whereas consumers must be willing to publicly engage with brands as a means of communicating personal identity. Finally, we argued that experiential promises require brands to establish a social context that enables consumers to play a given social role, which they in turn are required to accept and fulfil in order to deliver their end of the bargain.

The high-level consumer-brand involvement puts emphasis on the question of ethical responsibility for fuzzy brand promise delivery. This article has made an important, initial contribution to a future full-scale analysis of the ethical accountability of fuzzy brand promise delivery by developing two formal conditions of ethical responsibility – i.e. a brand requirement and a consumer requirement. On further analysis, we demonstrated how these requirements are themselves dependent on an ethical criterion of appropriateness, which again turned out to rest on the principle of proportionality, which should regulate the exercise of power that businesses have over consumers in the process of consumer-brand interaction. Given that power imbalance is a baseline ethical problem in relationship marketing (on which this article effectively builds) (Hingley, 2005; Pressey and Mathews, 2000), we assume that the principle of proportionality distills the essence of the ethical challenge that emerges when consumers embrace a brand and start to interact with it in ways suggested by the brand.

We encourage further research along the following two lines. First, our definitions of fuzzy brand promise delivery are explicative, meaning that they aim at encapsulating some central actual meanings and uses of the concept ‘brand promise delivery’ while at the same time imparting new meaning in order to spark reflections and provide a qualified, intermediary platform from which future descriptive definitions can be progressed. By reference to contemporary consumer research, we have shown that consumers expect brands to deliver fuzzy functional, symbolic, and experiential benefits. However, the link is implicit and rests on inferences, which, of course, could turn out to be invalid. Thus, one way to progress future definitions would be to reinforce the inferential justification with direct empirical evidence from research into consumers’ perception of fuzzy, functional, symbolic, and experiential brand benefits, as well as their perception of what type of consumer-brand interaction they render necessary and adequate in order to co-deliver fuzzy brand promises.

Second, the consumer requirement – though moderated through the criterion of appropriateness – places very strong epistemic and practical obligations on consumers in that they must be aware of and understand that they are required to engage in proposed consumer-brand interactions that might involve investment of considerable time and effort. Based on consumer research cited in this article, one can reasonably argue that this may not be the normative state of affairs for consumer goods in a service culture, where the company and brand ‘serve’ the consumer. Thus, it is a crucial task for future research to explore the potential ethical gap between (a) the extent of consumer-brand interaction generally required to deliver fuzzy brand promises and (b) what consumers actually are willing to invest in consumer-brand interactions.

Footnotes

Appendix

Table 1.

Conceptual constructs

Conceptual construct	Definition
Clear brand promise delivery	A brand delivers on a clear promise in its capacity as a certain product/service having a number of specific, product/service inherent properties.
Fuzzy brand promise delivery	A brand delivers on a fuzzy promise to the extent that the brand universe encourages a form of consumer-brand interaction, which – if adopted by the target consumer – brings about the promised future state of affairs.
Functional brand promise delivery	A brand delivers on a fuzzy functional promise to the extent that the brand universe facilitates and encourages certain patterns of consumption, which – if adopted by the target consumers – bring about the promised functionality.
Symbolic brand promise delivery	A brand delivers on a fuzzy symbolic promise to the extent that (a) the brand facilitates and encourages ways in which the consumer, C, can interact with the brand in order to communicate personal identity; (b) the proposed consumer-brand interaction influences C and other consumers to associate C with a desired self-image or social position.
Experiential brand promise delivery	A brand delivers on a fuzzy experiential promise to the extent that (a) the consumer willingly plays a social role in the brand universe implicitly facilitated and suggested by the brand and its context; (b) this interaction brings about the promised experience.
Promissory theory (expectationalism)	A’s making a promise to B grounds an ethical obligation to fulfil the promise insofar as A, by making the promise, intentionally raises B’s expectations that A will bring about a future state of affairs beneficial to B.
Brand requirement	If a brand makes a fuzzy promise to a consumer and thereby intentionally raises expectations of functional, symbolic, or experiential benefits, the brand is ethically obligated to facilitate delivery in such a way that the promised benefit is likely to be the case in the near future, should the consumer decide to interact with the brand in appropriate ways suggested by the brand universe.
Consumer requirement	A consumer can only hold a brand ethically responsible for failing to deliver a fuzzy promise if (a) he or she interacts with the brand in ways suggested by the brand that are conducive to delivering the promised benefit; (b) this interaction is insufficient to bring about the promised benefit within a foreseeable future.
Criterion of appropriateness	A suggestion for consumer-brand interaction to enable the consumer to co-deliver a brand promise is appropriate insofar as (a) the interaction is likely to be sufficient to bring about the promised benefit within a reasonable amount of time; (b) the suggested investment of consumer resources (e.g. time, money, energy, ego-positioning) is proportional to the promised benefit.
Principle of proportionality	Consumer-brand interactions suggested by a brand are proportionate to the extent that they (a) are fit to achieve the promised benefit; (b) do not exceed that which is necessary to achieve the promised benefit.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to editors and reviewers for providing such consistent, vibrant, and constructive feedback to all draft versions and, crucially, for believing in the core ideas of our article at a very early stage where the manuscript was still very much a work in progress.

Notes

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