How do consumer brand relationships affect the fallout from a brand betrayal? To answer this question, an empirical study of pop culture brands, Game of Thrones and Percy Jackson, is conducted by applying Susan Fournier’s brand relationship model. This paper analyzes two different consumer-brand relationships between married partners (Game of Thrones) and childhood best friends (Percy Jackson), through a framework developed to cross-analyze the two relationships in four fundamental ways: connections to self, values, emotions, and reactions to failures. This analysis yielded key marketing implications about Fournier’s consumer-brand relationship theory, brand transgressions, and how to manage these relationships.
