Putting Assumed Emotion in Fashion Brand Literacy: Understanding Brand-Identity Relationship in the Interdependent Asian Context

Over the past decade, consumer researchers have been interested in understanding symbolic relationship between consumers and brands, especially on identity construction (Elliott & Wattanasuwan, 1998; Escalas & Bettman, 2005; Kirmani, 2009) and its implications on brand management (Arvidsson, 2005; Holt, 2002; 2004). Following a cultural-psychological view to study how culture shapes brand-identity relationship, Eckhardt (2000) addresses that little attention have been paid to understand consumer behavior within interdependent cultures when compare with the prolific account of western literatures that reported the consumption behavior with an independent self-construal.
This paper strives to address this absence through researching how a group of Chinese youngsters internalize their cultural values with a sense of assumed emotion and developed local specific brand literacy towards fashion brands’ perception and consumption. Following Bengtsson and Firat (2006)’s concept of brand literacy, this interpretative research aims to extend our current understanding of symbolic brand consumption and brand-identity relationship in particular to the interdependent Asian context. The literature review discusses previous studies on brand symbolism in formulating brand-identity relationship and how social psychological understanding of interdependent construal of self can be applied to consumer researches. The cultural characteristics of Chinese consumers are also discussed with reference to previous indigenous consumer researches on symbolic brand consumption.