This article endeavors to advance research on the cultural resonance of brands by building bridges between branding scholarship in the consumer psychology tradition and interpretive research regarding brands and their meaning makers. We adopt a cognitivist conceptualization of cultural meaning and focus on the application of interpretive insights to well‐established constructs in the consumer psychology of brands: brand associations, product category associations, social identity, and self‐identity. This integrative exercise highlights the value of cultural models in explaining the processes whereby brands acquire meaning, and suggests several themes that are under‐valued when considering this process problem through a psychological lens: the motivational underpinnings of myths and other cultural meaning models, the relative value of shared cultural and brand meanings versus idiosyncratic meanings, the power and primacy of category‐level meaning making over brand‐level meaning making, the complex processes whereby brands gain and lose legitimacy, and the influence of lay theories about brands and branding on how consumers co‐create meaning for brands.

Our commentary focuses on the negative pole of Park et al.'s Attachment–Aversion continuum. We argue that the distinction between positively‐ and negatively‐valenced relationships matters, and open opportunities to further our knowledge about what makes a brand relationship “bad.” Two theoretical extensions are offered: (1) additional negativity dimensions beyond brand–self distance including pathology, power, and self‐ versus brand‐focused emotionality; and (2) distinctions between neutrality and variations of emotional ambivalence “in the middle” of the Attachment–Aversion spectrum. Our call is for a science of negative relationships concerning the negative outcomes, processes, states, and attributes of consumers' relationships with brands.

The dialogue between social perception and consumer–brand relationship theories opens new opportunities for studying brands. To advance branding research in the spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry, we propose to (1) investigate the process of anthropomorphism through which brands are imbued with intentional agency; (2) integrate the role of consumers not only as perceivers but also as relationship agents; (3) consider important defining dimensions of consumer–brand relationships beyond warmth and competence, including power and excitement; and (4) articulate the dynamics governing warmth (intentions) and competency (ability) judgments to yield prescriptive guidance for developing popular and admired brands.