Credibility, Emotion or Reason?
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Volume 6 Number 4
Credibility, Emotion or Reason? Onno Maathuis Positioneringsgroep, The Netherlands John Rodenburg Sanoma Publishers, The Netherlands Dirk Sikkel Tilburg University, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT Brands are built on credibility. Peoples’ readiness to buy products, services or stocks, to accept a job, to trust someone or to vote for a political party depends on credibility. But when is a brand credible? What can a brand do to increase its credibility? What are the possible consequences of lack or loss of credibility. Is credibility linked with emotions, or is it a matter of reason? In this paper, it is shown that it is a matter of both, but that the importance of the cognitive and affective component varies over the different brands. This has implications for brand communication on two different levels: (1) how to communicate in such a way that the desired mix of cognitive and affective perception is achieved and (2) given this mix: how to communicate in such a way that the brand’s credibility is optimized. INTRODUCTION Credibility once was the cornerstone of the product brand. A brand stood and stands for a fixed amount of a fixed quality for a fixed price. This enabled people for a large part of their purchases to decide routinely instead of having a complex decision process (every time tasting, smelling, weighing and acting). Credibility now comes back in different modalities. In the past, for instance, it has been seen that consumers take an interest in ‘the company behind the
brand’. Is the company who makes this brand trustworthy, how does it treat its employees and how does it deal with environmental issues? More and more consumers take credibility of the company with respect to these issues into account in their judgments on products and brands. Also in non-consumer markets, credibility plays a more and more crucial role. Companies make clear their positions towards the labour market, towards the stock market or towards public opinion. The position of Nike has been affected by rumors of child labour and exploitation of laborers in sweatshops in Asia. The same happened to Ikea, despite the fact that this company for years had an active policy to keep its network of suppliers clean of these practices. Coca-Cola has been for years one of the most prestigious brands in the world. Even this proved to be insufficient to avoid a publicity crisis in Belgium of unknown scale. In the literature on brand management, credibility is considered to be one of the most important characteristics of a brand (eg Aaker and Davis, 2000; Keller, 2000). When one considers brands to be a network of associations with an object (associations with a product, a service, an enterprise, a human, a political party, etc), then the aim of brand policy is to influence
Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2004, pp. 333–345 # Henry Stewart Publications, 1363–3589
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Credibility, Emotion or Reason?
those networks of associations. Factors that are of influence are properties of the receiver (eg motivation, interest and experti
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