The Holistic Vision of Brand Management

Over the past several decades, brand management has gone through an evolution from the traditional customer-oriented and firm-focused paradigm toward a wider vision concerning the target and the users of the brand and the process of creation of the brand value. In particular, the brand management literature has endorsed the stakeholder theory and service-dominant logic principles with reference to the process of determining the brand meanings and the brand value. The aim of this chapter is going over the evolutionary process of the brand management during the latest years in order to get to a holistic vision, considering the brand as a conceptual construction originated by the interaction between the firm and multiple stakeholders and the brand value as the result of a dynamic and social process of co-creation of the brand meanings and functions. Therefore, this chapter is conceptual in nature, and it aims to investigate the state of art of brand management providing conceptual examinations about the way the brand meanings and value originate, with a particular reference to the present economic and competitive contests dominated by the Web-based technologies and by the related interaction processes within a broad stakeholders’ ecosystem.