Conceptualizing Brand Schizophrenia and Identifying its Antecedents by Grounded Theory

Brands as major players of modern economy become more important day by day and researchers are seeking to explain and understand brand’s relationships and functions deeper with conceptualizations and creating constructs. Most of the recent conceptualizations describing brand’s functions have been through anthropomorphism approach to brands. As a consequence of this stream of researches, the concept of brand schizophrenia has recently been brought up in handful of books and some passing mentions on websites. Regardless of frequent use of this word, there is no academic and systematic investigation regarding this concept exactly and its causes so far. Thus, to fill this gap through the literature, this study aims at proposing a model to identify brand schizophrenia and its antecedents. As to the purpose of research, it is a fundamental research. The data were secondary data which exist through the current books and passing mentions of practitioners. To analyze data, grounded theory approach and its principles (open coding, constant comparison, generating concepts and categories) were employed. The results provide a model for defining brand schizophrenia and its antecedents. According to the results, inappropriate management of brand portfolio, lack of institutionalizing brand identity in organizational culture and inconsistency of brand identity were recognized as major causes of developing brand schizophrenia.