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1. Introduction
Brands are radically changing and becoming far more complex in response to smart technologies, hyperconnectivity, ubiquitous access to information, social practices and trends over social media and larger environmental turbulence (Leitch and Merlot, 2018; Swaminathan et al., 2020). Oh et al. (2020, p. 160) anticipated that “the role and influence of brands will dramatically change” and “it may also face paradigmatic shifts arising from macro changes in consumer demand, mainly due to technological developments”. Hyperconnectivity has created new actors such as micro-influencers, brand publics and unanticipated publics (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Wakefield and Knighton, 2019), and the scope of brand value formation in the extant branding frameworks is often limited to the context of brand communities (e.g., Hatch and Schultz, 2010; Kornum et al., 2017). The systems view of brands has recently gained traction, especially in the context of brand value and meaning co-creation and co-destruction (Conejo and Wooliscroft, 2015; Kadirov and Varey, 2011; Padela et al., 2021).
Systems thinking in branding research is an important theoretical development that moved the conceptualisation of brands from closed dyadic, triadic and networked perspectives towards an open system of interactions between networks of brand actors. This research perspective addresses brands as a complex cultural system or gestalt (Diamond et al., 2009), an interactive relationship system (Skaalsvik and Olsen, 2014) and a nested system of brand identities (Kornum et al., 2017). Most notable among these frameworks is Conejo and Wooliscroft’s (2015) semiotic brand system. While these conceptualisations have triggered a multi-disciplinary approach towards branding, there are several concerns: Are brands merely semiotic systems? Should the focus of brand outcomes be limited to the creation of brand meaning and value? Does the scope of brand actors within existing literature explain realities such as value destruction, consumer resistance and anti-branding in contemporary society? We argue that narrow conceptualisations of brand actors leave several systemic influences unacknowledged. A broader spectrum of brand actors’ connectivity, collaboration and competition should be considered to explain the complexity of collective brand value formation.
In this paper, we present a brand system framework built on marketing systems theory (Layton, 2007, 2011, 2019) to:
expand the scope of brand actors within the system;
configure brand value formation resulting in disproportionate brand...