Phenomenology of the Identity Concept in the Brand Audience’s Lived Experience of Industrial Products with a Relational Approach to Brand Management*

The concept of identity in the formation and evolution of management approaches to the brand has always been variable, from prescriptive identity-based approaches to more contemporary approaches such as relational approaches to brand management in which the concept of brand identity is formed during the brand lasting communication, its audiences and their life experiences. The present study seeks to find the answers of the questions related to the brand-consumer relationship; what independent and hidden variables affect the brand authentication by the consumer in the memorable lived experience of the brand and thus the sense of belonging to it? And under what relations do these variables achieve this important? It was done in two steps. In the first step, to achieve the formation nature of the identity concept in the brand-consumer relationship and extract the themes, categories and relationships between them and achieve a conceptual model in this field, the method of interpretive phenomenology and semi-structured interviews with 21 participants were used and in the second step, in order to generalize the results and analyze them, the extracted data provided to 384 participants in the form of a questionnaire and were surveyed. The data analyzed by SPSS and Amos, during which, by approving the structural model of the research, it was concluded that the formation of the identity concept in the lived experience of brand audiences and in the consumer-brand relationship are dependent upon at least 5 themes and 25 related categories.Therefore, it is suggested that brand managers, brand designers, marketers and other experts in these fields, look at the results of this research to create sustainable and identity-oriented brands, as a tool to get rid of the one-dimensional and prescriptive perspective to identity.