Brand, Identity and Reputation: Exploring, Creating New Realities ...

management of long-term relationships with lead users and communities of customers. In this case, users are not only a
source of technical and functional feedbacks on products and services, but may effectively participate in the
sensemaking process.
Conclusions and future research: the need for new capabilities
From a theoretical point of view, the paper aims at contributing to the debate on soft innovation by emphasizing the
crucial role of brand in it. We posit that two relevant dimensions – meanings and relations – represent crucial drivers of
non-technical innovation and that the firm has to carefully develop appropriate strategy to manage them. Specifically,
the firm can approach brand strategy and management in order to support the creation and spread of distinctive
meanings as well as to establish profitable relations with customers that help the firm nurturing and enriching such
meanings and firm‘s offering in general.
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