Human Brand Identity Types and Dynamics: The Role of Incongruent Extensions and Legitimacy Mechanisms - The Case of Film Directors

• Main Authors: Pluntz, Camille, Pras, Bernard
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brand identification; Brands; Identity; Legitimacy
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Professional human brands have become substantial research objects. Scholars have already focused on professional human brand building strategies (Parmentier, Fischer and Reuber, 2008,2013; Dion and Arnould, 2016) but have neglected to raise the question of human brand identity evolution. This issue needs to be addressed, as branded individuals are seen undertaking incongruent extension strategies in their careers, which come to alter their human brand's identity. Previous research suggests that only human brand identities resting on expertise associations (the chameleon conformist), or on expertise and creativity associations (the archetype) are viable (Parmentier et al., 2013). On the contrary, we assume that a human brand identity solely rooted in creativity associations can exist socially, and is thus also viable such as it is for artists (Becker, 1988) or charismatic creative persona (Dion and Arnould, 2011). Furthermore, we link the social existence of human brands to the legitimacy they hold (Arnould and Dion, 2013) in regards to various constituencies, that is, inside members of the industry (specific legitimacy), critics (bourgeois legitimacy) and the public (popular legitimacy) (Bourdieu, 1983). By conceptualizing incongruent extensions as sources of legitimacy loss/gain, the aim of our paper is thus to understand the legitimacy mechanisms which are activated by incongruent human brand extensions and which bring a branded individual to evolve from one professional human brand identity type to another. We focus on film director who are key human brands in the film industry (Kerrigan, 2010). We conduct two studies to answer two research questions: What are the professional identities available to human brands? What are the dynamics of professional human brand identities? The first study is based on an analysis of American Western film directors (1909-2011). The second study is based on in-depth interviews conducted among French film directors, critics, producers, and filmgoers. Study 1 In order to have a comprehensive view of the existence of human brand categories, we chose to analyze American Western film directors by following a "study of context" approach (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011), that is by confronting personal trajectories to historical and institutional trajectories (Brown, Hirschman, and Madaran, 2001). From an analysis of 570 American westerns, we identified four western waves (1909-1928: Silent Western movies; 1929-1962: Classic movie