Marketing Commons^™

Using Childhood Memory To Gain Insight Into Brand Meaning, Kathryn A. Braun-Latour, Michael S. Latour, George M. Zinkhan

Kathryn A. LaTour

In this article, the authors introduce the concept that people's earliest and defining product memories can be used as a projective tool to help managers more fully understand consumers' relationships to their products. The authors use a study on three generations of automobile consumers to illustrate how these memories symbolize the consumer-brand relationship and how they can be used to gain insights into brand meaning. The findings indicate that people's earliest and defining experiences have an important influence on current and future preferences in predictable ways across the consumer life cycle. These memory experiences are symbolic to the consumer and …