ABSTRACT
The economic approach lays the foundation for brand management as an independent scientific discipline, but one more stream of research is also influential during the first decades of this inquiry. In the infancy of brand management, the research focuses on the company as sender of brand communication. The idea of a dyadic relationship between brand and consumer profoundly changed the academic discipline of brand management. In marketing research, eight brand management approaches have been identified from 1985–2020: the economic approach, the identity approach, the consumer-based approach, the personality approach, the relational approach, the community approach, the cultural approach and the sensory approach. The approach extends the dialogue-based approach to brand management as instigated in the personality approach. The relational approach is rooted in the philosophical tradition of existentialism, and the methods are of a phenomenological nature.
