Brand Pathologies: “Monstrous” Fan Relationships and the Media Brand “Twilight”

Introduction

Monstrous bodies are the remarkable presences that appear as signs of civic omen, or trauma, and which demand interpretation: they offer a bit of each, apocalypse as well as utopia. (Ingebretsen, 2001, 39).

Relationships are purposive, involving at their core the provision of meaning to the persons who engage them…Relationships are multiplex phenomena: they range across several dimensions and take many forms… in response to contextual change… [brand relationship is] a vibrant psycho-socio-cultural construal. (Fournier 2009, 5, 9, 15, 19)

The Twilight media brand is a world-wide consumption phenomenon which predominantly speaks to female consumers who enter into both fantastic and corporeal relationships with its market manifestations (books, films, merchandising, and consumption communities). Twilight’s brand narrative reifies the psychological power and socio-cultural allure of the ‘monstrous’ vampire myth. The historical familiarity and wide-spread diffusion of the vampire trope enables a range of behaviors to be readily surfaced by its consumers. This branded accessibility proffers its consumers a spectrum of relational exposure which begins with ‘Twi-hard’ [devoted Twilight fan] fandom which can intensify to produce addictive and obsessive, compulsive, and transgressive behaviors.

The consumer’s relational exposure to this brand is the subject of this study. The authors discuss the tensions and paradoxes which underpin female consumption of this powerful brand. They also demonstrate disturbing dimensions to the construction of consumer-brand relationships (Fournier 1998) which impact on not only the imaginative life but the physical lives of the Twilight fans. In so doing they extend current thinking on the spectrum of fan behaviors, and comment on antithetical, ideological dimensions to the construction of consumer-brand relationships (Fournier 1998).