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The review examines the cognitive process of customers on exposure to brands and its associated meaning-making process. Marketers observe the cognitive process of customers as brand elements that form the reflective components of the meaning-making process. To understand the cognitive process better, it is essential to examine the constitutive elements of cognition- the sensory cues. The work details the interaction between customers and brands that get initiated through the brand communication made by marketers through online and offline marketing channels. Furthermore, the transmitted communication gets captured by the human brain through sensory cues that get decoded. These captured sensory cues and the subsequent meaning-making process leading to brand image formation have then been explored through a comprehensive literature review. Finally, a conceptual framework has been developed to link sensory cues with the brand identity elements that form the brand image. The framework will enable marketers to engage with customers through sensory marketing effectively.
Key Words: Brand Association, Customer-brand Interaction Process, Constitutive Concept, Sensory Cues, Sensory Marketing
INTRODUCTION
The ways by which a brand gets related to the consumers' mind space is an area of interest for both the researchers and the academicians. This relationship determines the consumers' awareness of a given brand, thereby increasing its brand equity as per cognitive psychology. Previous research works focused on understanding consumer responses into its parts such as feeling, imagery, and likability (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987; Bettman, 1970; Keller, 2003; Zaltman and Coulter, 1995). The aim of this study is to conceptually study the customer-brand interaction through sensory cues. Friedman (1992) details that the principles of pure understanding are "constitutive with respect to experience". On similar lines, the sensory cues form the constitutive component of the consumer-brand interaction process because sensory cues captured by the senses constitute experiential marketing (Schmitt, 1999). On the other hand, the regulatory principles move from the observable phenomena to measurable concepts. In the case of consumer-brand interaction, the brand identity elements (measurable concepts) move beyond sensory cues (observable phenomena) captured to form brand associations that form the regulative principles. Therefore, brand association is essentially a reflective component of consumer meaning-making process. We try to capture the process stressing about sensory cues that are the constitutive elements. When a customer is exposed to a...