In today’s highly inter-connected market environment, a holistic understanding of the emergence and transfer of brand meanings is essential to design well-grounded marketing strategies. Yet, research to date has grasped the phenomenon of brand meaning alteration mostly within isolated, theoretical concepts, such as Consumer Brand Sabotage (Kähr, et al., 2016), Doppelgänger Brand Images (Thompson, Rindfleisch, & Arsel, 2006), or Conspicuous Brand Usage (Ferraro, Kirmani, & Matherly, 2013). Hence, the present research was conducted to develop a systematic understanding of how unintended brand meanings emerge outside of marketer’s control. Based on Gioia’s case study approach, the two brands Birkenstock and New Balance were qualitatively explored, as both companies experienced a serious socio-cultural meaning transition over the last years. The findings indicate that marketers need to be aware of consumers taking psychological brand ownership – a possessive state of mind that evokes unpredictable interpretations and ostentations of brand symbols due to consumers’ desire for self-identity construction (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001). Psychological ownership is identified to impact both consumption practices and the process of meaning movement (cf. McCracken, 1986). In both cases, marketers lost control of their brands, as consumers utilized them to construct their self-identity and therefore altered the brands’ publicly perceived meaning. Whereas the brand meaning alteration had a positive outcome for Birkenstock, New Balance suffered badly under its brand disruption. Based on the researched insights, three key propositions are developed, which should support marketers to foresee, prevent, and countervail the emergence of unintended brand meanings.

Despite the recent promising findings on the influence of social media engagement on brand performance outcomes (e.g., De Vries & Carlson, 2014), researchers suggest that consumer engagement in social media sites requires a deeper understanding (Islam & Rahman, 2016). To respond to this call, we conducted this research to examine an important, yet under-researched, question on the underlying mechanism by which consumer engagement on social media drive improved brand performance. In this research, we develop and empirically test a conceptual model to investigate the relationships among consumer engagement, psychological brand ownership, brand loyalty, brand performance, and consumer’s word of mouth (WOM) in the context of social media. The findings suggest that consumer engagement influences brand outcomes through its indirect impact on consumers’ psychological ownership of the brand. When consumers engage themselves with the brand at social media sites, they tend to form bonds with the brand and develop a sense of community, of which they feel they are a part. Feelings of ownership motivate consumers to care for and nurture the growth of the brand, which manifests itself in terms of brand loyalty, positive word of mouth, and improved brand performance. The focus of consumer engagement in social media communities provides convincing evidence to support the benefits of using social media to connect with consumers. This research offers promising insights on how relationship with a brand can help create sense of community and feelings of ownership among consumers, which in turn drives better brand performance.