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EJM
56,3
768
Received 29 September 2020
Revised 29 March 2021
13 July 2021
12 November 2021
Accepted 22 December 2021
European Journal of Marketing
Vol. 56 No. 3, 2022
pp. 768-798
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0309-0566
DOI 10.1108/EJM-09-2020-0722
Brand magnification: when brands
help people reconstruct their lives
Gregorio Fuschillo
Kedge Business School, Marseille, France
Julien Cayla
Nanyang Business School, Singapore, and
Bernard Cova
Kedge Business School, Marseille, France
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct their
lives.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors followed five brand devotees over several years, using
various data collection methods (long interviews, observations, videos, photographs and secondary data) to
study how they reconstructed their lives with a brand.
Findings – Consumers transform their existence through a distinctive form of brand appropriation that the
authors call brand magnification, which unfolds: materially, narratively and socially. First, brand devotees
scatter brand incarnations around themselves to remain in touch with the brand because the brand has
become an especially positive dimension of their lives. Second, brand devotees mobilize the brand to craft a
completely new life story. Finally, they build a branded clan of family and friends that socially validates their
reconstructed identity.
Research limitations/implications – The research extends more muted depictions of brands as
soothing balms calming consumer anxieties; the authors document the mechanism through which consumers
remake their lives with a brand.
Practical implications – The research helps rehabilitate the role of brands in contemporary consumer
culture. Organizations can use the findings to help stimulate and engage employees by unveiling the brand’s
life-transforming potential for consumers.
Originality/value – The authors characterize a distinctive, extreme and unique form of brand
appropriation that positively transforms consumer lives.
Keywords Appropriation, Branding, Identity work, Life crisis, Phenomenology
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Of the many social and emotional benefits that brands bring to consumers, the mollifying
and supportive ones include soothing social anxieties (Seregina and Schouten, 2017),
nurturing social connections (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; Snyder and Newman, 2019) and
endowing consumers with pride (Hollenbeck and Patrick, 2016). The emotional and social
benefits that brands bring to consumers are numerous.
And yet, the intensity of these benefits seems muted when compared to stories of
consumers whose lives have been completely mended by their experience with a specific
brand. As we show in this paper, brands can help reconstruct entire lives. Understanding
how this mechanism works helps shed a new light on brands and their power in the
contemporary world.
 Consider the story of James Rath, an Apple fan. Born legally blind, James never had an Brand
easy time at school (Rath, 2016); he was bullied throughout his childhood, and first magnification
attempted suicide when he was only 11 years old. Adrift in sadness and depression, his
future looked bleak. But when James received his first MacBook Pro on his 14th birthday,
his life changed dramatically. The Mac’s zooming function allowed him to see things he
otherwise would not have been able to see. He could finally read his schoolbooks and catch
up with his homework. With his Apple Watch, he could orient himself on the street. With his 769
iPhone, he could read street signs. Apple’s accessibility features completely transformed
James’s life. With Apple products, James also fashioned a new identity for himself as a
filmmaker. He now lives in Los Angeles and is trying to find work in the film industry.
At first glance, the way James re-organized his life around the brand may appear extreme
and outlandish. But James’s story, and those of others, offer a unique window on the
potential of brand appropriation to rebuild a life. Brands can help people reconstruct their
lives.
Building on extensive fieldwork with brand devotees who experienced a major life crisis,
our findings unveil a unique kind of brand appropriation that goes far beyond the soothing
properties of brands (Holt, 2004; Seregina and Schouten, 2017) or the existential meaning
derived from intense brand engagement, such as brand love (Batra et al., 2012).
Brands can help consumers reconstruct their lives by enabling an especially intense and
beneficial type of reconstructive identity work. They scatter the brand around themselves as
if trying to constantly stay in touch with this very positive dimension of their life. They
create a completely new life narrative with the brand as their leitmotif and build a branded
clan of friends and family, separate from brand institutions, where they can perform their
new identities as brand experts. Brand appropriation, in this context, becomes much more
than a calming balm to soothe consumer anxieties. In fact, brand appropriation becomes
what we call brand magnification: a mechanism through which the brand becomes a
guiding force in people’s lives. In turn, brand magnification operates as a lifeline, allowing
people to overcome deep crises and lead meaningful lives once again. In other words, brand
magnification helps consumers bounce back.
We aim to make two main contributions to existing brand scholarship. First, we detail
the mechanism through which brand appropriation helps consumers reconstruct their lives.
More specifically, we adopt identity work theory as our enabling lens to detail how brand
appropriation facilitates the narrative, material and social identity work that consumers
undertake. If people manage to save their lives with a brand, they do so through intense
efforts that remold their identity. But while the possibility that brand appropriation may
facilitate life reconstruction has appeared in some places (Muñiz et al., 2013; Wohlfeil and
Whelan, 2012), this mechanism remains under-theorized. Our first contribution is to theorize
how brand appropriation facilitates total life reconstruction.
Second, we contribute to consumer research by depicting an entirely new type of brand
appropriation, which we label brand magnification. So far, appropriation has been described
as a resistance to consumer culture (Thompson and Haytko, 1997), an intimate process of
personalization (Epp and Price, 2010) or a collective process designed to strengthen group
belonging (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995). In contrast, our research features individuals
who, far from resisting consumer culture, embrace the brand and disseminate brand
incarnations in every corner of their life. And while brand appropriation is a purely intimate
process of personalization, brand magnification operates publicly as well as privately,
inwardly as well as outwardly. The phenomenon of brand magnification helps us shine a
new light on brand appropriation, and the life-reconstructing possibilities it offers.
EJM Theoretical foundations
56,3 We start with a puzzling question:

How can brand appropriation lead to consumers reconstructing their lives?

Past scholarship has shown how consumers appropriate products, places, images and other
branded items. Yet, appropriation scholarship does not help explain in what way brand
770 appropriation could possibly lead to the complete reconstruction of a human life. The idea of
a brand reconstructing someone’s life may seem far-fetched, but by digging into the identity
work consumers do to appropriate a brand, we come to understand how they might reshape
their lives.

Appropriation in marketing
Before evoking the potential benefits of brand appropriation, we need to introduce
appropriation as a concept in marketing. Broadly, appropriation refers to the act of taking
something for one’s own use (Strang and Busse, 2020). In cultural anthropology, for
instance, appropriation evokes the way dominant groups often take over objects and
cultural expressions that originally belonged to another culture (Ziff and Rao, 1997).
In marketing, along with acquisition and appreciation, appropriation can be considered
one of the three key moments in the consumption experience (Warde, 2017). Acquisition
refers to the production, delivery and access to goods. Appreciation concerns the pleasure
and meanings that consumers derive from consumption. Appropriation describes what
people do with goods once they have been acquired.
Thus, appropriation refers more specifically to the set of practices that allow people to
make things their own (Warde, 2017). Consider, for instance, the way Christmas gifts and
rituals transform commercial goods into meaningful possessions (Caplow, 1984).
Appropriation entails consumers making the vast world of consumer culture their own
through various tactics and strategies. While capitalism involves alienation and anonymity,
appropriation involves decommodifying and personalizing the world of commerce
(Kopytoff, 1986).
In building the theoretical foundations of our research, we need to highlight the three key
themes emerging from appropriation research. Indeed, as other authors note, past
scholarship on appropriation affords “fragmented insights into the appropriation process”
(Stavraki et al., 2018, p. 1888). We thus attempt here to distill the main insights that
appropriation scholarship has developed. Appropriation appears as:
 an act of resistance from consumers seeking to withstand the alienation and
anonymity of consumer culture;
 a way for brand collectives to foster group belonging; and
 an intimate process of personalization. We detail these three insights below.

First, appropriation encapsulates acts of defiance, such as the ways consumers reject firm-
driven brand meanings and come up with their own brand imagery as a form of protest
(Thompson et al., 2006). Through their oppositional reading of consumer culture norms,
consumers “articulate a personalized sense of fashion that runs against the grain of what
they perceive as a dominant fashion orientation of their social settings” (Thompson and
Haytko, 1997, p. 35). Consumers are unruly bricoleurs; they express their personal
sovereignty through nonconformist acts of consumption and the creation of experiences that
may transform offerings in ways that challenge the company’s original goals and
expectations (Torres et al., 2018). In this context, appropriation operates as an “act of
resistance to the abstraction and alienation entailed in the capitalist separation of production Brand
from consumption” (Arnould, 2007, p. 60). Appropriation as resistance means that people magnification
rework market offerings (Hewer and Brownlie, 2010), spaces, images, symbols and texts,
often in opposition to formal institutions, to maintain an area of autonomy from the market.
Second, appropriation helps cement groups of consumers. In the case of brand
communities (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001) and brand tribes (Taute et al., 2017), appropriation
helps bring together brand enthusiasts. They coalesce around complex brand rituals
771
(Pekkanen et al., 2017), and alter brand images and meanings to create distinctive identities
(Lane, 2021). Here, appropriation involves a wide variety of material practices that help
communities build bonds (Närvänen and Goulding, 2016; Schau et al., 2009). Schau and
colleagues (2009) show that brand community enthusiasts engage in endless discussions
about altering products, in turn, producing insider jargon and knowledge, and thereby
strengthening the community by creating a common language. Appropriation implies
creating new meanings, objects and practices that help consumer collectives articulate a
shared and distinctive identity (Schau et al., 2009).
Third, appropriation can also be a more intimate process through which “consumers
personalize and integrate objects into their lives” (Epp and Price, 2010, p. 822). People add
their own personal touches to commodities (Kopytoff, 1986). They invest significant
resources in personalizing their homes, even when they are constantly traveling and moving
(Figueiredo, 2016). Beyond objects, consumers also use various tactics and strategies to
personalize experiences, such as while visiting a modern art exhibition (Stavraki et al., 2018).
Consumers are deeply invested in making the world of consumer culture their own to suit
their individual life circumstances.
In this research, we approach brand appropriation as an identity-nurturing experience
that allows consumers to develop a positive identity. In doing so, we build from scholarship
demonstrating that consumer passion can help people develop a more positive identity. To
illustrate, Seregina and Schouten (2017) evoke the way teenagers can become accepted by
other youngsters when acquiring deep knowledge about brands their peers revere, such as
Harry Potter. In another example, evoking his fascination for the film star Jena Malone,
Wohlfeil describes how his passion helped him overcome feelings of loneliness and social
isolation:
Her artistic work and her textual persona has provided me with meaning, purpose and a source of
inspiration to enjoy life despite all the frustrations and disappointments I have suffered so far
(Wohlfeil and Whelan, 2012, p. 516).
Research on these market-mediated passions reveals a capacity for appropriation to
facilitate a more positive engagement with the world. It also suggests the possibility for
consumers to overhaul their life thanks to a brand. Our aim in this paper is to theorize this
process by attending to the kind of brand appropriation work that facilitates total life
reconstruction.
Our research uncovers a type of brand appropriation that allows individuals to
remake their lives through identity work. Identity work refers to a set of interlinked
activities through which consumers craft, repair and adapt their identities (Lutgen-
Sandvik, 2008). In theorizing brand appropriation as identity work, we build on
previous work suggesting that brands can serve as useful blueprints to guide one’s
life. As we will argue, though, a limitation of this scholarship is that it does not
consider the possibility that brands could be the very essence, the very balm that
helps someone heal and rebuild.
EJM The role of brands in identity reconstruction
56,3 Consumer research has surfaced the role of brands in helping people nourish their identity
projects, such as helping consumers express current and desired self-identities (Batra et al.,
2012). Research on brand love has also shown the intense work that consumers do in
collecting, sharing and recommending the brand and its products to others (Gumparthi and
Patra, 2020), and has even shown how consumers who love a specific brand use it to find
772 existential meaning (Bagozzi et al., 2017). But while they evoke intense brand engagement,
branding scholarship never goes so far as to suggest that brands could facilitate a total
reconstruction of a consumer’s life.
Branding scholarship portrays brands as warming balms helping people through
difficult times. For instance, Fournier (1998) introduces Karen, a recent divorcee, for whom
the brand Reebok symbolizes “the first conscious step taken away from marriage” (p. 355).
Lacing her Reeboks to go for a run means building a more independent self. Turning to
people trying to cope with cancer, Hollenbeck and Patrick (2016) suggest that a brand like
Nike can provide hope by tangibly attesting that one’s identity has been restored. Brands
soothe because they provide stability and hope. Brands can also smooth life transitions.
Young individuals “with painful deficits of cultural capital vis-à-vis their peers” resolve
“identity ambiguity” in the brand community (Seregina and Schouten, 2017, p. 125). The
brand community allows people to safely experiment with alternative selves (Seregina and
Schouten, 2017).
Although a hint of the possibility of identity reconstruction exists in past studies, the
mechanism through which individuals can remake their lives with a brand remains largely
implicit. At the same time, past scholarship does offer some clues on the kind of brand
appropriation that may facilitate identity reconstruction. One such clue is that
reconstructing one’s life with a brand involves identity work. Identity work refers to the way
individuals “augment identity coherence, manage multiple and intersecting identities, and
remediate identity threats” (Fernando et al., 2020, p. 769).
Identity work becomes especially relevant when consumers face a life crisis. Indeed,
under stable life conditions, identity work is largely “automatic and instinctual” (Lutgen-
Sandvik, 2008), but when facing events that cut deep into their well-being, people start
making conspicuous identity work investments. Serious life incidents, such as the loss of a
job or major health issues, transform identity into a central concern (Hollenbeck and Patrick,
2016). Faced with these challenging circumstances, consumers engage in intense identity
work. Based on our review of previous consumer research, we highlight three main forms of
identity work that consumers engage in to reconstruct their lives: material, narrative and
social.
First, when consumers engage in material identity work, they work to transform, repair
and customize consumption objects, and in so doing (re)build their selves (Ferreira and
Scaraboto, 2016). When people come up against unexpected life incidents, they engage in
material identity work by creating a material continuity between who they “were” and who
they “are.” In such situations, “material goods and experiences can be a critical and reflexive
component of coping” (Pavia and Mason, 2004, p. 453).
Second, consumers use products and brands to re-stitch compromised life narratives to
develop their identities-in-process (Schembri et al., 2010). Consumers use brands and their
products to facilitate the construction of their life histories (Shankar et al., 2009). To bounce
back after a life crisis, consumers need to make major adjustments to their life history.
Dramatic circumstances, such as bullying, can shatter people’s life narratives to the extent
that victims “lose their moorings and are cast adrift” (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008). To recover
from such upheavals, they revise the narrative of their lives to adjust to their new Brand
circumstances. People bounce back by re-storying their lives, often with the aid of brands. magnification
Third, consumers rebuild their social identities through brands and objects. For instance,
when people confront life shattering events, such as losing their home in a natural disaster,
the sharing of material resources among neighbors helps them build more and more positive
identities (Baker and Baker, 2016). By trading favors and by cooperating, people build
resilience (Caldwell and Henry, 2017).
In sum, past research suggests that people can stitch their lives together by doing 773
material, narrative and social identity work. And, although past scholarship hints at the
possibility of identity reconstruction, it very rarely goes so far as to suggest that market
resources, especially brands, can drive life reconstruction. On the rare occasions when
researchers do allude to the possibility of identity reconstruction with a brand, the
mechanism through which identity reconstruction takes place remains largely implicit. If
identity work is indeed key to reconstructing one’s life with a brand, we need to understand
how consumers set this mechanism in motion. Our research question is thus:

Can brand appropriation help reshape people’s lives, and if so, how?

Research methods
Our main objective is to understand how consumers might reshape their lives with a brand.
To do so, we immersed ourselves into the lives of brand enthusiasts since the kind of theory
building exercise we attempt requires intense and ongoing scrutiny (Fournier, 1998). We
thus started the project by identifying consumers with a long-lasting engagement with a
single brand.
On finalizing our sample, we mobilized numerous data collection methods to increase the
trustworthiness of our findings – interviews, observations, videos, photographs and
secondary data. This blend of data collection methods allowed us to develop thick
descriptions of our participants’ lifeworld and their engagement with the brand. Our
research approach, the sampling methods we mobilize and our data analysis process are
presented below in detail.

Research approach
The research approach used for this study is phenomenological. Our main focus is on the
lifeworld of brand devotees as they live and interact with the brand. The concept of lifeworld
in phenomenology (Thompson et al., 1990) refers to the world as it is experienced by a
person; in other words, a person’s subjectively experienced world.
In our case, focusing on the lifeworld of brand devotees is particularly pertinent since we
seek to understand how engaging with a brand might help consumers produce an entirely
new and positive world. We wanted to see how consumers built their own world, how they
managed to navigate a world given to them that they then made their own through brand
appropriation.
Methodologically, our focus on an individual’s lifeworld entailed immersing ourselves
deeply into the lives of consumers who engage profoundly with a single brand. Our research
design privileged extreme depth over breadth. We focused on a carefully selected sample of
informants but used a wide variety of data collection techniques, including long interviews
(which often lasted an entire day with a single informant), observations, videos,
photographs and secondary data. This blend of data collection methods allowed us to
develop detailed descriptions of our research participants’ relationship with a brand.
EJM Sampling process
56,3 Developing our pool of research participants proved to be one of the most challenging parts
of this project. In 2011, the first author engaged in a year-long search to find passionate
brand devotees and to study how their brand engagement affected different areas of their
lives. The first author started with an online search, looking for brands that are known to
generate consumer enthusiasm. He searched through blogs, forums and other websites of
774 consumers who demonstrated having a long-lasting passionate relationship with a
particular brand (more than five years).
After tapping into these different sources, the first author screened 20 potential
participants through a face-to-face or telephone interview lasting between 10 and 45 min.
The interviews began by inviting participants to narrate their engagement with the brand
they were passionate about. In so doing, the first author noticed that participants first talked
their brand-related activities, practices and social interactions, and only later, their life
background, concerns, interests and goals.
After this first step, the second step was gauging the potential participants’ willingness
to share intimate details about their lives over the course of a long-term research
relationship. This assessment took place during the last part of the interviews in step one
and was of paramount importance in determining whether participants would make it to the
screening step.
For the third step, the first author conducted semi-structured interviews with the 12
remaining participants. After conducting these interviews, he made a conscious choice to
drop potential participants committed to a single brand but whose lives did not seem to be
particularly affected or transformed by this commitment.
In the fourth and final step, and based on these semi-structured interviews, the first
author removed participants whose lives had not been reconstructed based on a brand.
Finally, the first author chose to focus on five participants and follow them in more depth:
Stacy (Disney), Dominique (Apple), Olivier (Playmobil), Raffaele (Nirvana) and Robert
(Vespa). All five participants were brand devotees who believed they had been able to
rebuild their lives with the brand.
The purpose of selecting this small sample of cases was to maximize our chances of
obtaining “thick data” (Moisander et al., 2020) about the way consumers engage with brands
when they go through a life crisis, namely, a rich context, authentic details and high
narrative quality. Moreover, in selecting these cases, our approach builds on past
scholarship using extreme sampling to isolate and study a particular construct, such as
extreme brand appropriation (Muñiz and Schau, 2005). We present our participants’ profiles
in Table 1.
Data collection started in 2011 with the first phase of selecting our participants and lasted
until mid-2012. The core data collection began in early 2012 and spanned a four-year period for
three participants and eight/nine years for the other two participants, during which we gathered
different types of material (Table 2). Long interviews, defined as “the most powerful means for
attaining an in-depth understanding of another person’s experience” (Thompson et al., 1989,
p. 138), were at the core of our research approach. We supplemented the interviews with
observations and visual materials to record the tangible manifestations of brand engagement in a
naturalistic way. Finally, to contextualize the lives of our informants, we gathered secondary data
on their social media activities and community belonging.

Phenomenological interviews
Interviews played a key role in mapping the moments and practices structuring our
participants’ identity reconstruction. The interviews initially focused on each
Research
Brand
participants Birthdate Education Profession Family situation magnification
Stacy 1970 Master’s degree Writer of detective stories Married with one daughter, living
in a Parisian suburb until one year
ago
Dominique 1957 PhD Manager and Professor in Divorced twice; married three
a business school times, with three children, living in 775
a big city in South-West France
Olivier 1976 High school Entrepreneur in toy Living with his partner in a big
industry city in South-West France
Raffaele 1974 Bachelor’s degree Engineer in health-care Married with three children, living
solutions industry in a small village in Southern Italy Table 1.
Robert 1951 High school Retired (ex-postman) Married with two sons, living in a Research participant
big city in South-East France profiles

participant’s engagement with the brand and aimed to detail the history and different
phases of their engagement. The interviews also helped further identify the
participants who had done significant identity work to reconstruct their lives with a
brand.
In the first round of interviews, we gathered preliminary data on our participants’
commitment to the brand. In the second round of interviews, the first author covered the
extensive ground with interviewees. After securing their agreement, he made plans to spend
a day with each participant and when this was not possible, a good part of the day (5–6 h on
average). These visits usually took place at the participants’ home and focused on
understanding each participant and on observing tangible manifestations of the brand in the
participant’s environment. Consistent with the phenomenological approach (Thompson
et al., 1989), the first author asked probing questions about their lives, including the more
emotionally challenging periods of their personal history. Discussions centered on how they
had managed to overcome significant life challenges with the brand. The participants were
asked to share their family photo albums, which allowed us to document the role of the
brand in family life (Epp et al., 2014). Photo-elicitation stimulated and enriched the stories
about bouncing back thanks to the brand (Harper, 2002).
During these visits, the first author followed the participants as they went about their
activities, engaging in informal conversations with them. Since one main objective was to
record tangible brand manifestations, the first author wrote field notes and took pictures
and videos to detail their environment (more on these observations below). The day usually
ended with a 1-h wrap-up semi-structured interview.
Data collection continued after the visit with follow-up interviews, alternating between
semi-structured interviewing and informal conversations focused on key issues emerging
from the previous interviews. While the interviews were usually conducted in the
participant’s home, they also took place in coffee shops, restaurants, at work, while traveling
in cars, walking around, over the phone, via Skype, Facebook chats and e-mail exchanges.
The first author used online exchanges as a way to further reflect on and clarify issues that
emerged during the interviews. He conducted an average of 3 interviews with each
participant for a total of 16 interviews across all participants. Three of the participants
(Dominique, Olivier and Raffaele) were very willing to make time for the interviews, while
for the other two (Stacy and Robert), access became more difficult after the second round of
EJM Research
56,3 participants Research program Research timing

Stacy  Two days of participant observation at Disney Park  Four-year span

 (2012–2016)
Three in-depth interviews (301 min; 111 double-spaced pages)
 12 single-spaced pages of field notes
776
 133 photographs
 138 min of video recording

Dominique  Two days of participant observation at home and  Eight-year span

workplace (2012–2020)
 Eight in-depth interviews (313 min; 117 double-spaced pages)
 10 single-spaced pages of field notes
 223 photographs
 40 min of video recordings

Olivier  Three days of participant observation at home and at the  Four-year span
store (2012–2016)
 Six in-depth interviews (356 min; 139 double-spaced
pages)
 Netnographic participant observation on two websites
 14 single-spaced pages of field notes
 103 photographs
 67 min of video recordings

Raffaele  Four days of participant observation at home  Eight-year span

 (2012–2020)
Eight in-depth interviews (367 min; 145 double-spaced
pages)
 Netnographic participant observation on one website
 Eight single-spaced pages of field notes
 110 photographs
 41 min of video recordings

Robert  Three days of participant observation at home and in his  Four-year span
Vespa club (2012–2016)
 Three in-depth interviews (223 min; 82 double-spaced pages)
 Netnographic participant observation on one website
 13 single-spaced pages of field notes
 75 photographs
Table 2.  52 min of video recordings
Data collection
interviews. Overall, the interviews led to 26 h of audio recordings, 564 double-spaced pages Brand
of verbatim text and 57 single-spaced pages of field notes. magnification
In addition to these interviews with brand devotees, the first author conducted 12
interviews with some friends and relatives of participants, allowing us to better understand
the social dimension of our participants’ brand commitment. Our objective was to try and
understand how the brand entered into their interactions with others. The significant others
chosen by the participants were: Deirdre (Stacy’s best friend), Matthieu (Dominique’s first 777
son), Laurent (Olivier’s partner), Matilde (Raffaele’s wife) and Fred (Robert’s closest friend).
The first author conducted two to three interviews with each significant other to gather their
perspectives on the participant’s life transformation and the role that the brand played in it.

Observations and visual materials

We wanted to observe and visually record the tangible manifestations of our participants’
brand commitment in a naturalistic way. After developing trust with each participant, the first
author took videos and pictures in: their home, their workplace, their vehicle and other sites
where they lived out their passion (e.g. the euro Disneyland Paris amusement park for Stacy).
The videos and photographs were taken in a naturalistic way when the first author was able to
spend a complete day with participants, collecting 594 pictures and 268 min of video overall.
Photographs and videos were critical in recording the physical settings in which the
brand played an important role. As we analyzed our data, we went back to these
observations and paid specific attention to the role of the brand in the participants’ lives, as
evidenced by body language, posture and the placement of the brand in these settings. For
instance, it was particularly striking to see that Olivier had glued a Playmobil figurine on
his car dashboard and had filled his car with Playmobil images. This type of visual evidence
helped us document the centrality of the brand in their lives.

Secondary data
We wanted to understand our participants’ interactions with the brand community and
other public realms. Thus, we collected secondary data on:
 our participants’ social media activity and contributions to community forums; and
 magazine and newspaper articles that featured stories about our research
participants.

For some participants (Stacy and Dominique) with limited offline and/or online involvement
in public groups dedicated to the brand, we mitigated the lack of information on their public
interactions by focusing more deeply on their intimate world. We used the participant
observations and interviews to focus on the way they mobilized the brand in various family
settings.
Recording our participants’ social media and forum activities (with their consent) was
key to documenting their relationship with the brand community. We browsed brand
community archives (such as the Marseille Vespa Club’s online forum for Robert) to examine
their interactions with other brand devotees. The social media activities recorded include
pictures and comments posted in public forums. We also developed an archive of Web pages
and press articles that mentioned our participants. We used these materials in the interviews
to help elicit their feelings about their brand commitment and the recognition they obtained
from it.
EJM Data analysis
56,3 As in other forms of phenomenological research (Thompson et al., 1989), data analysis
started soon after data collection began. Indeed, in phenomenological research, decisions
often have to be made as data collection progresses about what practices to observe or what
probes to include in the interview process. These decisions can be seen as informal data
analysis. For instance, the need to interview our informants’ significant others only arose
778 once we realized the importance of the brand in mediating their social lives. As such, the
data collection and analysis informed each other recursively.
More formal data analysis began after the completion of at least two long interviews with
each participant. We formally analyzed our data in three distinct phases. First, we developed
an idiographic analysis of each case (Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994; Thompson, 1997). We
studied the interview transcripts to identify major episodes, phases and turning points
around which the participants organized their life stories. We then used non-textual data
(e.g. pictures, videos and other personal archives) to refine, contrast and/or add new elements.
This process saw several iterations until all co-authors agreed on the codes to be assigned.
In the second stage, we conducted a cross-case analysis to identify common themes in
our participants’ life stories while also seeking to explain the differences in their brand
appropriation efforts (Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994; Thompson, 1997). We used variations
across cases to develop a preliminary brand appropriation model.
In the final phase, we sought to increase the validity of our analysis by triangulating the
sources, methods and investigators (Denzin, 1978). For instance, we confronted our brand
appropriation model with the visual data we collected. We went back to our videos and
pictures to refine the model, adding material and sensory nuances to our analysis. Going
back and forth between our data, model and the consumer research literature, we then
developed a multidimensional brand appropriation framework for identity reconstruction.
Finally, all three authors agreed on the brand appropriation framework that we present
below.

Introducing our research participants

As per our selection process, all participants had demonstrated deep passion and a long-
lasting relationship with a particular brand: 38 years for Dominique with Apple (since 1982);
19 years for Olivier (since 2001) when he rediscovered Playmobil, his favorite childhood
brand (until age 14); 23 years with Disney for Stacy since she arrived in France (1995) until
she returned to America in 2018 (she visited her first Disney Park in the USA when she was
14); 30 years for Robert (since 1990) when he rediscovered Vespa, his uncle’s scooter, when
he was a child; and 29 years with Nirvana for Raffaele who discovered the band when he
was in high school (since 1991).
Their intense commitment reveals itself in the way they bought, consumed, collected and
even created branded items. Consider, for instance, the case of Dominique, one of our brand
devotees. In 1984, Dominique started working for Apple and his intense working hours were
one of the key factors in his divorce in 1987. He left Apple in 1991 but continues to buy every
new Apple product and regularly attends Apple events. In fact, his brand devotion became
even more pronounced once he left the firm. In the 1990s, when the company was facing
difficulties, he even bought Apple stock to help them stay afloat. In 2020, now that
Dominique teaches marketing, he gets his students to work on collaborative projects based
on the Apple brand.
This intense lifelong commitment to a brand extends to our other participants. Indeed,
Olivier has been playing with and collecting Playmobil toys since childhood, dedicating an
entire room in his house to his passion, filled to the brim with his collection. Olivier has also
set up a business that involves trading vintage Playmobils. Stacy visits Disneyland Paris Brand
almost every week, and by 2012, when the first author met her, had visited the park more magnification
than 500 times. She watches the Disney Channel every day and knows the lyrics of every
major Disney production. Robert has a collection of 11 Vespas and leads a local Vespa club.
Raffaele collects every Nirvana-related object and regularly contributes to a Nirvana
community website he created (www.nirvanaitalia.it).
779
Findings
Our participants faced deep personal crises yet managed to transform their lives through
brand appropriation. Our findings start by mapping their journey, from hitting rock bottom
to rebuilding their identities. We then show how brand appropriation eased a specific type of
identity work, which was critical to their identity reconstruction: material, narrative and
social. First, our participants fill their world with the brand in ways that enable them to stay
in touch with this very positive aspect of their lives. Second, they built a new life narrative
structured around their brand passion. Finally, they make the brand a pillar of their new
social identity.

Bouncing back: from trauma to rebuilt identities

All our participants went through traumatic life circumstances, including accidents, divorce,
bullying, stigmatization and social isolation. For our research participants, trauma appears
to be the trigger for brand appropriation to produce their identity reconstruction work.
Certain brands may enter people’s lives for the first time, often when they are children or
adolescents, without being linked to a trauma (Stacy, Dominique, Robert).
Other brands are found in childhood (Olivier) or adolescence (Raffaele) to compensate for
the effects of repeated trauma. In this case, the brand may be put aside when the shock
caused by the trauma seems to have been cushioned (Olivier) and be rediscovered
accidentally when the traumatic shock resurfaces or it may accompany the person for the
rest of their life (Raffaele). What differentiates the two paths experienced by consumers in
the brand appropriation is the type of trauma they experienced: either accidental trauma
linked to an episode in the person’s life (moving abroad, divorce, fall) or permanent trauma
linked to the person’s social condition (homosexuality, geographical isolation).
Our research details the long-lasting identity work that propelled them toward a better
life.

Dominique
A defining moment in Dominique’s life was his divorce and ensuing separation from his son.
When Dominique talks about his divorce, he evokes the shattering of a dream he had of
having a stable family. The pain he describes is not merely the pain of physical separation
from his son. Divorce created an unbridgeable gap with the traditional model of the stable
nuclear family that his parents exemplified. But even though Dominique divorced twice, he
kept his family united (a group of 15 people) with the help of Apple products. Dominique
even wrote a doctoral thesis on his passion for Apple. On the day of Dominique’s thesis
defense, 15 members of his family sat in the audience, listening to him talk about the role of
Apple in binding them together.

Olivier
Olivier went through an especially difficult childhood. Schoolmates bullied him for his
effeminate voice and demeanor. He never felt accepted by his parents either. His passion for
EJM Playmobil, though, changed his life. The brand became the fulcrum around which Olivier’s
56,3 life pivoted. He started selling second-hand Playmobil toys, creating new figurines himself
and became a celebrated entrepreneur in his community. Living with his business partner,
his passion cemented a new kind of family for Olivier.

Stacy
780 Stacy, an American, moved to France at the age of 26 to join her French husband in Paris
but was never able to fully adapt to life in France. She missed her hometown in Georgia, and
described feeling stigmatized and rejected for being American, especially around 2003 at the
height of the Iraq war when the French could not stop mocking America’s “freedom fries.”
She also recounted how difficult it was for her to find a new apartment in Paris. Eventually,
she settled on a place in the suburbs in Marne la Vallee, where Disneyland Paris is located.
Apart from the ease of finding a house there, Stacy also enjoyed the easy access to
Disneyland. Living so close to the park allowed her to easily relive some of her childhood
memories. Disney became much more than a temporary escape for Stacy. While immersing
herself in Disneyland smoothed her adaptation to a foreign country, she also began using
the Park to transmit American values to her daughter, who was born soon after their move
to Marne la Vallee: family happiness, multicultural diversity and open-mindedness. Disney
not only became a soothing reprieve from bullying but also gave Stacy a sense of purpose.
Stacy went from being a stigmatized American to a proud American mother.

Raffaele
While growing up in a small Italian village, Raffaele experienced a deep sense of isolation.
Because of his rural background, he always feared coming across as culturally backward to
his classmates. Raffaele’s efforts at masking his origins illustrate Goffman’s (1963) insight
that the “discreditable expanded efforts to manage the information about his failing” (p. 42).
Through his passionate engagement with the band Nirvana, Raffaele went from feeling
shameful about coming from a small village to becoming leader of the Nirvana community
in Italy. Music experts now recognize Raffaele as one of the major custodians of Nirvana’s
legacy.

Robert
In 1990, Robert injured his spine after a bad fall at home. This was the start of recurring
back pain that Robert still has today. Robert experienced the loss of his physical abilities as
a bereavement. Adding insult to injury, Robert soon lost his job. Little by little, Robert began
feeling like an outcast with no ability to contribute to society. Rediscovering his Vespa,
which was lingering in the garage, marked the beginning of a deep transformation. Robert
went on to create one of the most vibrant Vespa clubs in the country. He has now become a
central figure of the local Vespa club, whose fame extends beyond national boundaries.
Overall, if taking stock of our participant’s journeys, what they have achieved appears
extreme. They have managed to overcome a major life crisis and have completely rebuilt
their lives (see Table 3 above). Our findings below detail how brand appropriation facilitated
a particularly intensive type of identity work, in turn, enabling their life transformation.

Material identity work: staying in touch with the brand

Our research participants regularly see, touch and engage with the brand. However, beyond
just the comfort of things (Miller, 2008), the brand operates as a material resource they
appropriate to nurture and perform a rebuilt identity. They use the materiality of the brand Brand
to nurture and make their identity reconstruction tangible. magnification
Filling their world with the brand
The way our participants fill their world with the brand is not ordinary or “normal.”
Consider the following examples: Robert has 11 Vespas in his garage and his living room is
covered in Vespa pictures; Dominique neither travels nor sleeps without his complete Apple
panoply by his side, and he has gifted Apple objects to the 15 members of his closest family
781
circle; Stacy stores her collection of Disney DVDs and many other products in her home,
staying in contact with the brand’s materiality by regularly immersing herself in the Disney
Park; Olivier is surrounded by Playmobil figurines in his home, car and shops; Raffaele
keeps all kinds of Nirvana memorabilia at home and has dedicated an entire room to his
passion.
For some participants, filling their world with the brand means scattering its tangible
incarnations in their everyday surroundings. Olivier has created a particular branded theme
for his life, in the same way, that commercial operators create unique themes for
servicescapes (Diamond et al., 2009). In his car, Olivier has stuck a Playmobil knight on the
dashboard as a lucky charm to protect the car and its passengers. Other Playmobil
characters are attached to Dominique’s key chain, and Playmobil patches have been sewn
onto the car seats. No other brand appears in his car whose cleanliness and orderliness
border on the maniacal. Although Olivier describes his workshop as a mess, he has neatly
arranged dozens of boxes full of Playmobil toys. It is as if Playmobil has helped organize
every space that Olivier regularly patronizes.
In contrast to Olivier’s scattering of brand incarnations, Raffaele has curated his
environment to keep the brand scarce yet meaningful. Despite continuing to run the
“nirvanaitalia” website, Raffaele has packed away many Nirvana-related items accumulated
over the years and has placed the more meaningful items in a bookcase. He can gaze at this
branded shrine from anywhere in his one-room apartment. On very rare occasions, Raffaele
listens to the Nevermind album, which always gives him goose bumps. The album captures
a moment and marks an identity reconstruction mechanism that Raffaele started 20 years
ago.
Finally, for Stacy, what matters is being in the Park and the feeling of having made the
Park her own. The field notes suggest that Stacy knows every nook and corner of
Disneyland Paris:
Stacy reminds me several times of how good she feels when she visits Disney, how she likes to work
there or walk around. She takes me with her to the lobby of the New York hotel and she invites me to
sit on one of the sofas. She plunges into the couch, telling me how good she feels here. Sometimes she
comes here on purpose, just to sit there and watch the people walking around the hotel. She does the
same thing at the other hotels at Disneyland Paris (Field notes March 1 2013).

Research participants (Brand) Trauma Successful reconstruction

Stacy (Disney) Stigmatization as a foreigner American mother transmitting

Dominique (Apple)
Olivier (Playmobil)
Raffaele (Nirvana)
Robert (Vespa)
American values
Divorce and separation from his son Family man Table 3.
Bullied at school Successful entrepreneur Achievements –
Geographic marginalization Custodian of the band’s legacy From Trauma to
Accident and job loss Club leader rebuilt identities
EJM Stacy entertains a corporeal and sensuous relationship with the branded servicescape.
56,3 Disneyland has become a central pillar of her identity as an American living in Paris, so
contact with the details of the lobby or the comfortable sofas generates feelings of comfort
and ease.

Protecting and defending the brand

782 If branded goods become material identity incarnations, it should come as no surprise that
our participants are invested in the brand’s survival. They expend significant time and
resources to defend the brand, both at the microlevel of caring and maintaining branded
objects and at the macro level of ensuring that the brand remains strong and alive.
At the microlevel, Robert regularly checks what he calls his Vespas’ “health status” and
maintains meticulous “health records” (what he calls a “carnet de santé”) detailing the
condition of each Vespa. He has dedicated an entire garage, which he calls “the kids’ room,”
to his 11 scooters. He visits and tends to his “kids” every day. After every ride, Robert covers
his scooters to protect them as if he were tucking the kids into bed.
At the macro level, our participants take various measures to ensure the brand remains
well and healthy. They talk about suffering when the brand is damaged, and take drastic
measures to protect the brand when it is under attack. They experience a symbiotic
attachment to the brand as if their own survival depended on the brands. Take Dominique:
when Apple was fighting for its survival in the 1990s, Dominique was no longer working for
the company. Nevertheless, he would regularly visit Apple retail outlets to rearrange the
brand’s merchandising:
Dominique: [With Matthieu] we frequently turned on Macs that were off [at the point of sale]. We
wanted our cherished brand to seduce new customers. We wanted it to come back to the top.
In rearranging Apple’s computers in its shops, Dominique tried to evangelize and attract
new consumers; having consumers buy the brand again would mean saving something that
had become very important to him.
Our participants make sense of who they are through the active protection of the brand.
Raffaele created the Nirvana website to revive a brand he thought was dying. Similarly,
Olivier very much wanted to keep the Playmobil brand alive. In 2010, Olivier turned his
passion into his own work. He opened a Playmobil store (Klikobil) where he buys, restores
and sells old Playmobil toys, an activity that he used to do with his own Playmobils. In the
quote below, Olivier details how his launch of the business was motivated by his desire to
care for and protect the brand and the objects that are part of the brand universe:
Olivier: The principle itself is to regenerate Playmobil toys, to put them back into circulation, and
so back into children’s bedrooms for a second life, a fourth life, a fifth life, until eventually this
continues to eternity. Playmobil toys do not die. So there it is, Playmobil toys do not die, and will
never die. With us [Klikobil] and with children, Playmobil toys never die.
A main guiding objective in structuring Olivier’s engagement with the brand is keeping the
brand alive. His business is a great way for him to turn his passion into a way of earning a
living. Indeed, like many entrepreneurs, Olivier has managed to turn his passion into a
business he can live off (Daskalopoulou and Skandalis, 2019). What we want to emphasize
here, though, is the importance of the caring material practices that breathe new life into the
brand that the participants are so attached to. We note that this is very different from the
practices evoked when describing brand love, for instance, where consumers are mostly
invested in what the brand can do for them rather than in caring for and nurturing the
brand. One could argue that for Olivier, caring for the brand is a way to build his own
identity as an entrepreneur. Yet, the depth of material practices involved in taking care of Brand
the brand makes this kind of brand appropriation a distinctive mechanism. magnification
These findings converge with past research highlighting the way passionate brand
owners take on the role of defenders of a brand they feel has been attacked (Muñiz and
Schau, 2005). In our case, though, these defense tactics are intimately connected to
individual identity projects. If brand devotees devote so much time and resources to
protecting the brand, it is at least partly because the brand has become an anchor for their 783
identity.
Our participants’ appropriation work nurtures their identity but also impacts the brand.
For instance, Olivier and his Klikobil store have gained fame for creating new figurines by
combining existing ones. Olivier invents unique figurines according to the inspiration of the
moment:
Olivier: In 2011, I told myself that I was going to make characters myself. Marilyn Monroe,
Michael Jackson, these are characters everyone knows and has fun with. That’s fun to do with
Playmobil characters, like Freddy Mercury.
Like our other participants, Olivier has developed brand-related competencies that allow
him to extend the brand by producing “brand surfeits” (Nakassis, 2013). Brand surfeits are
social meanings and material forms that exceed and transgress a brand’s authority and
intelligibility. Olivier, for instance, produces a wide range of material brand surfeits,
constantly altering branded objects that he then sells online.

Narrative identity work: rewriting life stories with the brand

When talking about their brand fervor, our participants weave powerful stories of epic
redemption. We treat the crafting and telling of these stories as the kind of identity work
through which people regain agentic control over their life’s meaning in relation to a sort of
miracle worked by the brand. The stories our participants recounted about their lives were
not merely “a way of telling someone about one’s life” but also “the means by which
identities may be fashioned” (Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992, p. 189).

Ascribing a miraculous role to the brand

Participants talk about the brand performing miracles for them. They describe the
miraculous impact that the brand has on their lives. Consider the language Olivier uses
when describing the role of Playmobil in his life:
Olivier: I now have a life, I can earn money. That allows me to eat, to pay my way, and to live [. . .]
It [the brand] allows me to live well today, and to carry on, allowing me to eat and to live well. So
in fact it’s the messiah [. . .] (laughing) it’s the messiah!
When Olivier talks about Playmobil as the “messiah,” he laughs, probably sensing the
incongruity of using a religious metaphor to discuss a brand of toys. Yet, Olivier probably
relies on religious language because it best captures his experience of a deep life
transformation (whether Playmobil constitutes an individual religion for Olivier could be
debated but is outside the scope of this article). More importantly, our brand devotees assign
a miraculous role to the brand when they describe its role in transforming their lives.
For Dominique, the role of the brand as a life-transforming device became especially
noticeable after his divorce when his 15-month-old son Matthieu went to live with his ex-
wife. Since then, Apple objects have become essential devices for maintaining a relationship
with his son and soothing the pain of a childless fatherhood. The first miracle came in the
EJM form of the shared father-son passion for Apple and the Mac (“taught my son Matthieu,
56,3 when he was just two years old, how to use the mouse and MacPaint”):
Matthieu: What was great is that we had a common passion for the brand, which strengthened
our bond. It is like a father and a son who are avid fishermen, and want to spend an afternoon on
a boat, share a moment. For us, it was not a fisherman’s boat, it was the Apple Expo. But I think it
amounts to quite the same.
784 The second miracle came through the emergence of possibilities to communicate through
the computers and thus to reassemble the family (Epp et al., 2014). The launch of the iMac in
May 1997, promoted as the first computer designed for the internet, corresponded to the
start of a new era for Dominique:
Dominique: The brand is like a support, a resource that together with my children Matthieu,
Chloé, and Carla, we use to be together and do together or exchange together, or hear each other
say: “I am proud of you, you taught me something” (for instance when Clara taught me some
keyboard shortcuts). The bond is strengthened by doing things together but also in saying “look
dad what I am doing while using the brand you love” and in waiting for a smile and the voice that
says “that’s great, I am so proud of you”.
For Stacy, a miracle happened in a single day, on the 4th of July, when Disneyland provided
her all the cultural bearings she had been missing as a stranger in a strange land:
Stacy: I was depressed once on the 4th of July several years ago. Back at that time at the Hotel
Santa Fe [in Disneyland Paris] they had a big open area where they do rodeo shows, the 4th of
July. On that day they had guys coming up with American flags and did the whole [pause]. When
I left that night, I was ‘Yeah!’ you know I got my 4th of July and it wasn’t even expected, I didn’t
expect it. I got a rodeo show with the American flags and everything, how great was that! And
those cowboys had no idea of what they did for one person in the audience; you know I got my 4th
of July.
The fantasy world behind Disney provides magic to Stacy in the form of an impossible
dream becoming a reality. She got her 4th of July and felt American even in a strange
country.
What is striking in the accounts of our participants is the underlying power of the brand.
They frame the brand as a life-saving device, as effecting “mini-miracles” (Higgins and
Hamilton, 2016). For them, the brand has delivered them from the suffering they experienced
and transformed their life. Speaking of brands in religious terms is not entirely novel, as
past scholarship shows that religious narratives “help us make sense of the people,
institutions, and things in our lives, including those in the marketplace” (Muñiz and Schau,
2005, p. 737). Where we differ, however, is in taking the mobilization of religious language as
a foundation for identity reconstruction.
In crafting their life stories, our participants oscillate between the brand as capable of
performing miracles and their own heroic journey, and between the brand’s capacity to
magically metamorphose their life and their own agency in reconstructing it. Yet, even as
they assign the brand supernatural powers, our participants remain the central characters of
the stories they tell.

Crafting a branded epic story

Past research has highlighted the relevance of an epic lens to study various aspects of
consumer culture, such as the daunting task of choosing a wedding dress (Dobscha and
Foxman, 2012) or confronting noisy and overpriced retail outlets (Brown et al., 2018). In such
cases, the consumer’s journey becomes a heroic struggle against adversity, but the brand or
the market feature as the villains of these epic stories, such as Wal-Mart in activists’ Brand
personal stories (Hollenbeck and Zinkhan, 2010). magnification
In contrast, while our research surfaces heroic battle stories, the brand appears as a
helpful, quasi-magical companion. With the brand, participants stitch together a new story
of the brand devotee as a hero who eventually emerges triumphant. Our brand devotees
intertwined the brand into their stories and saw the brand as the lift they needed to keep
going.
Epics usually start with the appearance of “monstrous gods” (Brown et al., 2018, p. 65). 785
Similarly, our participants’ stories begin with vile circumstances and characters. The
villains in Stacy’s story are French people ridiculing her for her American origins, a
challenge she coped with by immersing herself in the Disneyland universe:
Stacy: To me, the French are really bad. They quickly want to find out where I am from [. . .] As
soon as I say I am American, I go into the American box and, you know, sometimes I’m offended
because yeah, I’m American but don’t put me in the box! I’ve lived here for 17 years. I don’t need
to be in the box. I like living here but just don’t put me in the box.
Like Stacy, our other participants confronted traumatic events and people that prevented
them from living a good life. For instance, Dominique describes his divorce as preventing
him from living the family life he dreamt of. These events and characters are like illnesses:
nasty companions that are so destabilizing that they generate an identity crisis.
Epics “revel in battle” (Brown et al., 2018, p. 65), and our participants evoke tropes of
“fighting against the odds” with the help of the brand’s magical qualities. This aspect
becomes clear when we hear Robert talk about how he changed his doctor’s mind about the
Vespa’s healing properties:
Robert: Every time I went to see a doctor or a surgeon, the first thing that came to my mind was to
convince them that the Vespa was good for me. Because I was afraid of one thing, that they would
say “Now it’s time for you to stop riding the Vespa!” At that moment, I could have done
something stupid. It had become too important to me. I could not live without the Vespa. I swear I
went to my doctor, I explained how the Vespa made me feel better, I even took a piece of paper, a
pencil, I did the drawing, you know, of the character sitting on the Vespa and everything.
In Robert’s account, the brand plays a crucial role in helping him regain a sense of stability
in his life. Yet, at the same time, he also emphasizes his own agency in confronting
adversity. His life narrative features a hero surmounting the obstacles stacked against him.
The brand becomes a resource for Robert to re-story his life in a more positive light.
Similarly, Apple facilitates the reconstruction of Dominique’s life by bolstering his
relationship with his son:
Dominique: At the end of the summer of 1984, I introduced the Macintosh to my son. He was
probably one of the first children to use the software Mac Paint in France. In hindsight, I feel a
sense of pride. I introduced my son to a technological object that allowed access to what I
imagined to be the future of our society: a society of knowledge, based on access to information,
the creation and sharing of knowledge. This is an object that very few people possessed and very
few children could access.
Their passion leads brand devotees like Dominique to develop what Bromberger (1998)
describes as a “modest and humble heroization of the self” (p. 37) in charting their journey.
Dominique talks about his pride in introducing the Macintosh to his son, emphasizing his
pioneer spirit and his role in giving his son access to a “society of knowledge.” Hollenbeck
and Patrick (2016, p. 76), in studying cancer survivors, show that “brands provide a means
for achieving this heroic archetype.” But whereas brands stimulate cancer survivors to
EJM engage in heroic activities (e.g. starting their own local charity), our participants’ heroic
56,3 journeys are closely linked to the brand. Rather than merely dynamizing, the brand infuses
their lives as if it were a magical partner accompanying them in various life phases.

Social identity work: (re)building a branded clan

Previous research has investigated how individuals construct their identity through brand
786 communities and consumer subcultures (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; Schouten and
McAlexander, 1995). In contrast, our findings show how identity work also happens within
what we call a branded clan or “tiny public” (Fine, 2012), i.e. a small group of friends or
family members. Our findings are consistent with the insights that objects play an
increasingly important role in mediating social life (Cetina, 1997) but highlight that this
mediation helps nourish social relationships at a very local and immediate level.

Setting up and maintaining a branded clan

The consumers we studied all expend significant efforts in (re)creating a small group of
family and/or friends, what we call a branded clan. These are carefully curated clans that
valorize their rebuilt identity. Hence, Olivier’s clan does not include his parents, but it does
include his business partners since they accept and value him as a Playmobil expert. Our
research participants present and develop their re-crafted identities within these protected
social settings, which become the primary setting of validation for their identity
reconstruction.
Olivier set up his Klikobil shop specifically to work with his partners. Initially
established as the House of Playmobil, he renamed it to create a new professional identity
that included his business partners, his new family, to whom he can enact his new identity.
Olivier never felt at ease in his own family, believing they did not provide him with the trust
and nurturing he needed while growing up. As an only child, Olivier turned to Playmobil to
overcome his loneliness and the brand, in turn, helped create a tight clan for him later in life,
as shown in a picture taken by a journalist that features prominently on Olivier’s desk at
work.
The picture shows Laurent, Olivier’s life and business partner; Olivier; and François, a
business partner. In the background lies the Klikobil store that Olivier and his partners
created in Toulouse. Particularly striking in this picture are the two Playmobil figurines
positioned as if they were real people and part of the family. These statuettes are not merely
anthropomorphized (Fournier, 1998) but also mobilized for the construction of Olivier’s new
family, and totemic in the way that a totem can be like a “friend” or an “elder brother”
(Durkheim, 1912). While Olivier enacts his identity as a Playmobil expert in other settings
(for instance, in interactions with the media), his branded clan becomes a regenerative
cocoon for his identity.
Stacy’s clan “Entre Amis” (among friends) does not include her French neighbors and
has 80 English-speaking people from the Marne La Vallée area and is associated with
Disneyland Paris. The club was originally set up as a support network for English-speaking
Disney employees. For several years, Stacy acted as a board member of this formally
organized association, warning that “the common element therefore is that all the activities
are in English and if you are not comfortable in English you may find the activities are not
for you” (https://entreamis77.webs.com/about-us).
In Dominique’s case, the brand was critical in maintaining and improving the
relationship with his son Matthieu, even though Matthieu lived with his mother after the
divorce. During each of his visits, even when Matthieu was a baby, Dominique would sit
with him in front of his treasured Apple computer and show him how it worked. As
Matthieu grew up, they played games and watched videos on Dominique’s computer until Brand
he gifted Matthieu his very own Apple computer. Today, after his second divorce, magnification
Dominique stays connected to his three children with his Apple devices. Apple objects have
become essential to sustaining his identity as a family man who remains close to his
children despite a divorce. The brand even cements the family’s identity: “If you are a Billon
[Dominique’s surname], you have to own an Apple. If not, you are not a Billon,” says his
wife, Valérie. The brand has become a powerful glue for Dominique’s branded clan.
Through the branded clan, our participants give their new life narratives a familial 787
shelter to protect their identities from potential damage. Under the gaze of significant others,
our brand devotees can develop and protect new forms of self-worth. These clans may
compensate for all the humiliation and disrespect they experienced in their own biography.

Keeping brand institutions at bay

A distinctive feature of our research is the way brand devotees keep brand institutions at
bay. They either resist or do not even consider the re-integration of their tiny group into
official brand institutions. For instance, Olivier has always stayed on the margins of the
Playmobil brand community. On community forums, some members have accused him of
profiting from their passion. However, instead of seeking to redeem himself in the eyes of the
community, Olivier focuses on his small world, especially customers who come to the shop
“to discuss new Playmobil collections or series they would like to create, and all the stories
invented around Playmobil.”
Similarly, Robert has deep concerns that his local Vespa group should remain a “group of
friends,” and has resisted previous attempts by the national Vespa federation to interfere
with the management of his small club:
Robert: Maybe I am taking this quite far, but seeing that Piaggio [the company that produces
Vespas] does not provide anything, and that the French Federation of Vespa Clubs provides
nothing either, I say that we must remain a group of friends. We should be a bunch of friends, and
stay that way.
In the quote above, he seems especially reluctant to involve more formal brand institutions,
such as the French Federation, as if trying to protect the stability of his branded clan from
outside influences. Our participants were adamant that their branded clan suffices for them.
Hence, while Dominique argues that the brand has been useful in re-assembling his family,
he does not want to get together with members of the Apple brand community:
Dominique: I like working on their machines. I like following the history of the brand, seeing their
marketing strategy in action, but I do not want every social occasion to become about Apple. For
me these are tools that fascinate me, right or wrong, because they amplify your cognitive abilities,
your capacities to communicate, and this feeling I live in my family! I do not feel the need to go out
and interact with other people outside, talk about Apple the whole night. That really bores me.
Despite his deep passion for Apple, Dominique does not feel the need to engage with brand
institutions. He also maintains some distance with the official brand community and other
brand-related institutional forms. Similarly, our other participants appropriated the brand to
create small worlds, but resist any attempt from brand institutions to de-appropriate them.
For instance, after initially maintaining close connections with Disney, Stacy’s group “Entre
Amis” is no longer formally linked to Disneyland Paris.
In concluding our findings, we return to our research question: Can brand appropriation
help reconstruct people’s lives, and if so, how? Our answer to the first part of this question is
a resounding yes: brand appropriation helped our brand devotees achieve a better life
through an especially intense form of appropriation, which we call brand magnification.
EJM Regarding the mechanism through which this occurs (the “how” part of our question),
56,3 Figure 1 summarizes the three dimensions of brand magnification:
(1) staying in touch with the brand;
(2) rewriting life stories with the brand; and
(3) rebuilding a branded clan.
788 In terms of the relationship between these different dimensions of brand magnification, the
effort that brand devotees make in rewriting their life stories can only be truly effective
when they receive social validation from the branded clan. Similarly, the investment made in
filling one’s world with branded products and images only makes sense if it is admired and
commented on by members of the branded clan. Finally, it appears difficult to legitimize life
stories with the brand without being surrounded by branded representations. For instance,
Dominique wrote his thesis (rewriting life stories) on the reconstruction of his family clan
based on Apple (rebuilding a branded clan) using several Apple devices (being in touch with
the brand).

Discussion
Can brand appropriation allow consumers to reconstruct their lives? After following our
brand devotees for several years, we would answer with a resounding yes. We have shown
that people can completely remodel their lives by appropriating a brand.

Staying in touch with

the brand
• Filling their world with the
brand
• Protecng and defending the
brand

Rebuilding a Rewring life stories

branded clan with the brand
• Seng up and maintaining • Ascribing a miraculous
a branded clan role to the brand
• Keeping brand instuons • Craing a branded epic
at large story
Figure 1.
Three dimensions of
brand magnification
These findings may surprise or even outrage, especially since many people remain deeply Brand
suspicious of brands as symbols of materialism and capitalist excess. Yet, our research magnification
establishes that we still have much to discover about brands. Converging with the insight
that we still have to consider the “new roles in which brands are containers of socially
constructed meaning” (Swaminathan et al., 2020, p. 41), we show that brands also offer
people with shattered lives the possibility of reconstructing a world that speaks to them.
Yet, people do not achieve a better life by passively accumulating branded commodities and
789
experiences. Instead, they actively work at appropriating the brand system to reconstruct
their life. In this section, we detail how these findings help us extend what we know about
the role of consumer culture in enabling life reconstruction and the critical role of brand
appropriation in this process.

Life reconstruction through brand appropriation

Our main contribution is unveiling the mechanism through which some consumers
reconstruct their lives by appropriating a brand. We show that this process builds on the
transformative power of identity work and operates at three levels: materially, narratively
and socially.
First, at the material level, our participants collect, use and display an array of branded
items. Through these appropriation efforts, they are able to regularly see, touch and engage
with the brand. The appropriation rituals they develop include, at the microlevel, caring for
and maintaining branded objects, and at the macro level, ensuring that the brand as a whole
remains strong and alive. They protect the brand’s heritage by producing “brand surfeits”
that they recommodify through market exchange.
Second, at the narrative level, our participants assign a quasi-religious role to the brand.
What helps them reconstruct their lives though is not the narrative power of the brand
stories (Holt, 2004), but the revised epic they create around the brand, with themselves as
central characters. Brands may have mythological power (Brown et al., 2013; Holt, 2004), but
it is through the narrative work of individuals that the power of the brand becomes fully
realized.
Third, at the social level, our participants create a branded clan that differs from a brand
community or a brand tribe. In contrast to other brand collectives, such as communities,
which usually bring together strangers who coalesce around their brand passion, the
branded clan is a small group with existing kinship or friendly ties. In the branded clan, the
brand does not precede the emergence of the group. Rather, the brand becomes an object
that further cements an existing group by facilitating rituals (Stratton and Northcote, 2016).
Our first contribution is thus to theorize a mechanism that has largely been implicit in
consumer research: how brand devotees might use a brand to positively reshape their lives.
We argue that our appropriation grid shines a new light on a variety of brand appropriation
journeys featured in consumer research. Take, for instance, Otnes and Maclaran’s (2007)
study of the British Royal Family (BRF) tribe. When the authors introduce “Elizabeth,”
leader of the tribe, we see that her home, in which she has accumulated vast BRF-related
memorabilia, has also become a focal point for the rituals and traditions that structure the
tribe. She has managed to create a branded clan that valorizes her identity as a BRF expert.
Similarly, in a study on adult Lego fans (Muñiz et al., 2013), we see instances of narrative and
material identity work but also the critical role of a community that helps people express
and further nurture their love for Lego. A nurturing and validating social realm seems
important for people to reinvent their lives. A contribution of our research is to theorize the
links between this social identity work and life reconstruction.
EJM Our findings also converge with past scholarship showing that intense brand
56,3 relationships can help reduce physical pain due to the brand’s ability to provide a feeling of
social connectedness (Reimann et al., 2017). As in other research, we demonstrate that deep
brand engagement can produce a range of positive effects (Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen,
2010). Yet, in past scholarship on brand love, for instance, the mechanism through which
consumers produce positive changes in their lives has remained largely implicit.
790 Our contribution is to theorize this mechanism: to reveal the identity work that
consumers perform with the brand they love, and how, in turn, this affects their lives. As the
evidence we have just presented suggests, instances of brand magnification may also
manifest in other settings. By featuring extreme brand engagement, our study might make it
easier to study, observe and surface the kind of brand appropriation that helps people
reshape their lives.

Brand magnification
Our second contribution is to extend scholarship on brand appropriation by featuring a
unique type of brand appropriation, namely, brand magnification. Importantly, instead of
resisting consumer culture, brand appropriation as brand magnification entails the
glorification of a paragon of consumer culture, the brand. This glorification is done by
shining a light on the brand and making it a visible and central feature of the consumer’s
life, amplifying the brand by extending its range of meanings and material incarnations. As
we argue below, brand magnification contrasts with the way appropriation has been
described in past scholarship, although it presents some similarities regarding the (not so
intimate) process of personalization and the way of fostering group belonging.
Brand magnification cannot easily be described as a way to resist consumer culture;
quite the opposite. Our participants do not try to fight brand institutions, as in other
research featuring brand devotees (Cova and White, 2010), as they do not engage in resisting
the brand and its discourses. What we see is brand devotees who glorify the brand and
defend it when under attack. They work and live with the brand, but their efforts to work on
the brand are designed to regenerate their own life. Even when they turn their passion into a
business, as in Olivier’s case, the brand becomes a guiding device to reconstruct one’s life,
with entrepreneurial success as a tool for this reconstruction. In addition, the work they do
in altering the brand may appear similar to the modification and customization of branded
products (Närvänen and Goulding, 2016; Schau et al., 2009), but cannot be easily labeled as
resistance. On the one hand, the brand devotees we studied change the material life of the
brand, its representations and discourses, but much of this creative work often happens
outside brand guidelines and institutions. They create different kinds of unauthorized uses
of the brand or “brand surfeits” (Nakassis, 2013). For example, the website that Raffaele
created around Nirvana is an immaterial surfeit that facilitates new interpretations of the
brand. On the other hand, these brand surfeits are not forms of resistance to brand authority
but additions that emerge from individual reconstruction projects. The main goal of brand
devotees is to transform their own lives, not to disrupt or resist the brand. Brand
magnification thus stands as the opposite of an act of resistance to consumer culture: an act
of glorification through the brand.
Regarding the other two themes that are key in appropriation theory (an intimate process
of personalization, and a way to foster group belonging), the opposition between brand
magnification and conventional brand appropriation is less marked but still shows attempts
at glorifying the brand.
Rather than simply an intimate mechanism of personalization, brand magnification is
both private and public. While brand devotees expend efforts to welcome brands into their
private world (Epp and Price, 2010; Figueiredo, 2016), they are also public actors facilitating Brand
the circulation of brand components back into a market system. Olivier’s business as an magnification
entrepreneur recycling toys is a perfect illustration of this role of brand devotee as a broker
with a particular set of skills helping to introduce new objects and meanings to the market.
When our participants defend the brand on community websites and other spaces, they are
public actors. Our brand devotees operate at the boundary between private and public
realms, between their own brand shrines and the more public side of the brand that emerges
in social interactions, forums and servicescapes. Through the brand competencies they 791
acquire, they can move in and out of these spheres. At times, they even recommodify the
brand in market exchanges (Schau et al., 2009). This mechanism calls into question “our
conventional ways of thinking about consumption and production” (Kornberger, 2010,
p. 272). Indeed, we show that brand magnification involves circulating the brand between
the private and the public in a constant inward-outward flux, with the brand devotee as a
key broker of this circulation.
Finally, with brand magnification, the brand community is not a central concern. When
brand devotees use the brand to form “tiny publics” (Fine, 2012) of friends and family, the
focus is on solidifying relationships within the collective. Each tiny group mobilizes a
specific brand to create and define itself and its members. A unique brand – materializing
according to the episodes in different artifacts – plays the role of intermediary between the
members of the tiny group. The brand becomes a boundary object, helping mediate between
the past and the contemporary experiences of the group’s members, allowing them to build
and relive a shared past and eventually create a common history. In so doing, they invent
new rituals involving the brand (Pekkanen et al., 2017), and create new brand meanings
(Lane, 2021).

Managerial implications
For managers, our work implies that even a single passionate brand devotee can become a
great source of consumer insights. As we have seen, the brand is present in almost every
corner of the devotees’ lives: social, professional, material and emotional. Looking at these
passionate individuals can help marketers generate new ways of thinking about consumers
and the various ways they engage with the brand.
Ethnographers are already tapping into extreme segments to help organizations
stimulate consumer insights. Arguments for studying extreme users include the fact that
they provide a window into the future, they are more articulate about their needs than
average users and often develop creative workarounds to solve product issues (Hildebrandt
and Hindi, 2020). Extreme users allow marketers to generate insights by looking at
consumers who deeply engage with a product category or brand.
Similarly, by looking closely at the life of a brand fan, marketers can better understand
what it is to be truly passionate about a brand but also how the brand can potentially fit into
someone’s life. Thus far, this focus on extreme users has mostly taken the shape of brand
community studies (McAlexander et al., 2002; Schau et al., 2009), but we also recommend
that managers attend to a few individuals and focus on their appropriation efforts to create a
good life. Listening to Robert and his story of feeling free again on his Vespa is to be
reminded of the freedom that mobility devices afford consumers. Similarly, if a marketer
were to spend time with Olivier, he or she would be reminded of the joys that consumers can
find in assembling entire collections of Playmobil or improvising workarounds to mend
objects, and surround themselves with the brand. Spending time with Stacy is to realize that
Disney-themed parks can become therapeutic servicescapes that can help people recover
from scarring experiences. Across these different examples, we see the potential for
EJM consumer research teams to access a treasure trove of new insights on what the brand can
56,3 do, what it can mean, how it can fit into people’s life circumstances and how they can
magnify it.
Granted, these passionate brand fans are rare. Most consumers of a brand are not
interested in developing the kind of deep emotional relationships that marketers want to
develop with them (Connors et al., 2021). Yet, intensely passionate brand fans can provide
792 insights and stimulation for brand research teams.
In addition, for the teams working on developing the brand, hearing stories of consumers
whose lives have been positively affected by the brand can prove uplifting. After all,
brands can also suffer from a negative reputation. Many people are suspicious of brands as
symbols of capitalism’s worst excesses (Klein, 1999). Without denigrating these powerful
criticisms, we must also consider that many people in marketing departments live and
breathe the brand (Cayla, 2013). The brand gives employees specific values, emotions and
meanings that guide their actions for the company but also affect them deeply at a personal
level, endowing their lives with a sense of purpose. In turn, brands that nurture engagement
seem able to reduce churn and further foster engagement (Berger-Remy and Michel, 2015).
Exposing employees to stories of life transformations thanks to the brand can potentially
balance brand criticisms in the media and academic scholarship. Especially when working
for well-known brands like Apple or Disney, employees may be subjected to various
criticisms. Global brands, in particular, are increasingly reviled as a symbol of the power of
giant corporations (Callanan, 2015; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). And we know that such
criticisms can deeply affect organizational members since the brand often also becomes a
key resource for them to construct their own identity (Dutton et al., 1994). To counterbalance
these effects, stories of consumers reconstructing their lives with the brand can further
nurture employees’ sense of social utility. At a time when employees are increasingly
looking for meaning in their work, stories of customers whose lives have been changed by
the brand can significantly improve engagement at work (Grant, 2007). Brand employees
need to know that a good life can also emerge from the appropriation of a brand. Through
magnification, the brand can have a profound, life transforming impact on consumers.

Future research
A significant limitation of our research is the focus on cult objects, such as the Vespa or
Apple computer, which allow consumers to surround themselves with the brand. As Stacy’s
case illustrates, dwelling in the comfort of things (Miller, 2008) is more difficult in the case of
service and experience brands. Frequent visits to Disney allow her to immerse herself in the
brand’s universe, and by living next door, Stacy’s immersions are relatively easy. She has
made the Park a second home. Yet, questions remain about the potential for service and
experience brands to facilitate the type of identity work we have evidenced. Future research
could fruitfully explore these differences by exploring how different kinds of brands
facilitate different types of life reconstructions.
While our research features consumers who positively transformed their lives, future
studies could fruitfully explore the lives of brand employees. Although scholarship has
started to examine the way brands become sources of meaning and guidance for
organizational members (Berger-Remy and Michel, 2015), we know little about the way
brands impact the lives of employees outside the walls of the corporation. Future
researchers could take a similar approach and track the narrative, social and material ways
people’s lives are affected when they work for a brand. Such research would go a long way
to bridging the artificial gap between research on production and research on consumption.
 On the consumer side, future research could also explore the negative effects of the Brand
intense brand engagement we investigated. If people totally reconstruct their lives around a magnification
brand, a worrying consequence may be progressive disengagement from aspects of
everyday life that are not connected to the brand. The more consumers immerse themselves
in branded environments, the more they leave behind the rest of the world. Beyond a
different economy of attention, what brand magnification may entail is the loss of skills and
competencies that are not connected to a brand. In sum, brand magnification can help people
reconstruct their lives but may also obscure parts of the nonbranded world.
793

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Appendix. Case selection process Brand
From the outset, we were looking for a small sample of participants to investigate the phenomenon of magnification
brand appropriation for life reconstruction. We looked specifically for brand devotees for whom the
brand had played a key role in their remedial process. This search was especially challenging,
undertaken by the first author and lasted an entire year. An additional difficulty was brought by our
decision to focus on individuals and not communities, as done in previous research.
We went through four selection steps to arrive at our final sample of five participants (See
797
table A1 below for a description of each round). In the first step, the first author aimed to find
participants who had a long-lasting enthusiasm for a single brand, a commitment to the brand for
more than five years. The first author started with an online search by looking for brands that are
commonly known to generate consumer enthusiasm. He searched through blogs, forums and other
websites of consumers who seemed extremely committed to a certain brand. After tapping into these
different sources, the first author screened 20 potential participants through a face-to-face or
telephone interview lasting between 10 and 45 min; all had demonstrated extreme passion for a single
brand and had maintained a long-lasting engagement with that same brand. Each interview began
by inviting participants to narrate their engagement with the brand they were passionate about. In
doing so, the first author noticed that research participants first expressed themselves about brand-
related activities, practices and social interactions and only later on their life background, concerns,
interests and goals.
The second step was to gauge the potential participants’ willingness to share intimate details
about their lives over the course of a long-term research relationship. This assessment was done
during the last part of the interviews in step one and was of paramount importance to determine
whether the participants would make it to the third step of screening.
For the third step, the first author conducted semi-structured interviews with the 12 remaining
participants. After conducting these interviews, he made a conscious choice to drop potential
participants who were committed to a single brand but whose lives did not seem to be particularly
affected or transformed by their commitment to the brand. For instance, when the first author met
Gianni at his home in Marseille, his unequivocal passion for Vespa did not, however, bring forth the
types of life changes we were looking for. For Gianni, Vespa seemed to operate as a symbol of taste
and connoisseurship; it was not a life-changing brand.
In the fourth and final step, based on these semi-structured interviews, the first author dropped
further participants whose lives had not been reconstructed based on a brand. In the end, the first
author decided to focus on five participants.
EJM Step 1 of Step 2 of Step 3 of Step 4 of
56,3 recruitment recruitment recruitment recruitment
Long-lasting Willingness to Experienced Brand helped
Research enthusiasm engage in a long- hitting rock overcome life
participant Brand for a brand lasting study bottom challenges

798 Dominique Apple    

Stacy Disney    
Raffaele Nirvana    
Olivier Playmobil    
Robert Vespa    
Baptiste Lego    –
Giuseppe Vespa    –
Jarno Lego    –
Fred Vespa    –
Gianni Vespa   – –
Bruno Jaguar   – –
Olivier Vespa   – –
Rosanna My Little Pony  – – –
Salvatore Vespa  – – –
David Ferrari  – – –
Guillaume Naruto Shippuden  – – –
Alain Harley  – – –
Table A1. Antonio SSC Napoli  – – –
Case selection Mary Nirvana  – – –
process Salvo Tomb Raider  – – –

Corresponding author
Bernard Cova can be contacted at: bernard.cova@kedgebs.com

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