Establishing a Brand Connection With Customers

How Customers Actually Connect With Your Brand: Schmitt's Consumer Model Explained

You launched a product you believe in. The quality is there. The purpose is real. The research looked promising. And yet, sales are not where you expected them to be.

This is one of the most frustrating positions a business owner can find themselves in. You did the work, built something worth buying, and customers are not connecting the way you thought they would. Before you slash prices or blow your budget on ads, the more productive question to ask is this: do you actually understand how your customers are forming a relationship with your brand?

Bernd Schmitt's Consumer Model of Brands offers a framework that answers exactly that. It maps the journey a customer takes from first awareness to genuine brand loyalty, and it reveals where most businesses are quietly losing people without realizing it. This is not a theoretical model that lives in a business school textbook. It is a practical lens for understanding why some brands build passionate communities and others sell a reasonable product that nobody talks about.

Let us walk through the model using a real scenario: a new sustainable shoe brand with strong values, quality construction, and a charitable giving component that is struggling to gain traction despite doing everything the conventional marketing playbook says to do.

The Problem With Doing Everything Right

The sustainable shoe brand in our example is, by most measures, a good product and a good company. The shoes are made from recycled materials, the production process has a significantly lower environmental impact than conventional shoe manufacturing, and a portion of every sale goes to charity. The product is functional, comfortable, and built for outdoor use.

The marketing has focused on all of these things. Environmental impact. Functionality. Sustainability credentials.

And sales are disappointing.

The problem is not the product. The problem is that communicating facts about a product is not the same as building a relationship with the customer who buys it. Schmitt's model helps explain why, and more importantly, what to do about it.

Stage One: Identifying

The first stage is where the customer begins to compare your brand against others they already know. This happens before they have made any decision to buy. They are gathering information, scanning social media, reading reviews, looking at your about page, maybe asking a friend who they saw wearing a similar shoe.

For the sustainable shoe brand, this is the moment when a potential customer types something like "eco friendly running shoes" into Google or scrolls past an ad and thinks "that looks interesting." What they find in those first few moments will determine whether they move forward or move on.

Most brands at this stage lean too hard on their credentials. They lead with certifications, materials lists, and environmental impact statistics. This information matters, but it is not what makes someone stop scrolling. People at the identifying stage are asking a much more basic question: is this brand for someone like me?

The opportunity here is to communicate not just what the product is but who it is for and what kind of life that person lives. A customer comparing shoe brands does not start by reading the recycled material specification. They start by asking whether this brand feels like something they would be seen in. Identification begins with identity, not information.

Stage Two: Experiencing

This is where the customer begins to have a direct sensory response to your brand. Sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste all play a role depending on the category. For a shoe brand this means the moment someone tries the shoe on in a store, holds the box for the first time, feels the texture of the material, smells the packaging when they open it.

In a physical retail environment the experiencing stage is more natural. The customer picks up the shoe, feels the weight, examines the construction, tries it on and walks a few steps. Every one of those moments is a brand touchpoint that either reinforces or undercuts the story being told in the marketing.

In a direct to consumer online environment this stage is harder to engineer but not impossible. Brands that offer try before you buy programs are essentially recreating the in-store experience. The packaging becomes a critical tool because it is the first physical interaction a new customer has with the product. A box that is thoughtfully designed, uses sustainable materials, and opens in a way that feels deliberate communicates the brand values more effectively than any marketing copy.

For the sustainable shoe brand, the question to ask at this stage is whether every physical touchpoint reinforces what is being communicated in the marketing. Is the packaging experience consistent with the brand story? Does the smell, feel, and visual presentation of the product at the moment of first contact confirm that this is a brand worth paying attention to?

Stage Three: Integrating

This is the stage where the customer begins to build a coherent picture of your brand in their mind. They have done their research, maybe tried the product, read enough reviews, and now they are synthesizing all of that information into a judgment. They are deciding what kind of brand this is, what it stands for, and whether it is worthy of their trust and their money.

Schmitt describes this as the point where customers assign a brand personality. They begin to think about brands the way they think about people. A shoe brand might be seen as adventurous, dependable, rebellious, sophisticated, or any number of other personality traits. The customer is not consciously doing this. It happens naturally as a result of all the signals the brand has sent across every touchpoint.

For the sustainable shoe brand, the marketing has been communicating environmental responsibility and functionality. Those are important but they are not a personality. They are features. The integrating stage requires the brand to go deeper and ask what kind of person buys this shoe and what does that say about them. If the answer is "someone adventurous who cares about the planet," then every piece of content, imagery, messaging, and brand presentation needs to reinforce that personality consistently.

This is also the stage where it is worth going back to the identifying stage and asking whether the signals being sent there are consistent with the personality the brand wants to own. If the goal is adventurous, is the social media presence adventurous? Are the images being used in ads showing real people doing real outdoor things, or are they studio shots of the shoe on a white background?

Stage Four: Signaling

Once a customer has integrated a brand into their understanding of the world, they begin to use that brand as a signal. This is where purchase decisions stop being purely rational and start being social and psychological.

People buy brands for three related reasons. They buy to show other people who they are. They buy to reinforce their own self-image. And sometimes they buy to tell themselves who they want to become. A customer who buys an adventurous sustainable shoe might be saying to the world that they are someone who goes on outdoor adventures and cares about the planet. They might also be buying the shoe because they aspire to be that person and the purchase feels like a step in that direction.

For the sustainable shoe brand, the signaling stage represents a significant missed opportunity if the marketing has only focused on product features. Someone buying this shoe is not just buying footwear. They are potentially buying membership in a community of people who think differently about consumption, who prioritize sustainability, and who want their purchases to mean something beyond convenience. If the brand is not communicating that membership clearly, the customer has no signal to send.

This is why brands with strong missions need to give their customers language and identity, not just product information. When a customer can say "I buy this brand because I am the kind of person who cares about where my products come from," the brand has successfully created a signal worth sending.

Stage Five: Connecting

The final stage is where genuine brand loyalty is born. This is where customers develop a deep attachment to your brand, not just a preference for it. They become repeat customers, advocates, and community members. They are proud to support the brand and they tell others about it without being asked.

Schmitt emphasizes that connection requires emotional, self-centered, and social engagement. All three have to be present for the relationship to be durable.

The Jeep example illustrates this perfectly. Jeep owners wave at each other on the road. This is not something Jeep invented or engineered as a marketing tactic. It emerged organically because Jeep created a product that attracted a specific type of person and then let that community identify itself. The wave is a social ritual that reinforces belonging, pride, and identity all at once. It costs Jeep nothing and builds loyalty that no advertising campaign could replicate.

For the sustainable shoe brand, the connecting stage is where community building becomes essential. Are customers being given opportunities to engage with each other? Is there a visible community of people who wear the shoe? Is the brand celebrating its customers publicly and making them feel like part of something larger than a transaction?

Connection is not built through email newsletters and loyalty points alone. It is built through genuine shared identity, consistent brand behavior, and giving customers something to be part of that they are genuinely proud to belong to.

Taking Your Brand Through the Five Stages

The sustainable shoe brand scenario is not unique. Almost every business that struggles with customer connection is running into the same core problem: they are communicating facts when they should be building identity.

Walk your own brand through each of Schmitt's five stages and ask honest questions at each point. At the identifying stage, are you communicating who your brand is for and not just what your product does? At the experiencing stage, do every physical and digital touchpoint reinforce your brand story? At the integrating stage, do you have a clear brand personality that shows up consistently everywhere? At the signaling stage, are you giving your customers something meaningful to express about themselves when they buy? At the connecting stage, are you building a community with genuine shared identity?

Most businesses find that they are strong at one or two stages and weak at the others. Identifying the gaps is where the real work begins.

Keeping Brand Strategy Organized

Running a business while simultaneously managing brand strategy, marketing campaigns, community engagement, and product development is genuinely difficult. The thinking and planning that goes into something like a Schmitt model analysis tends to get buried under the urgent day-to-day demands of running operations.

Updoot is built for exactly this. Whether you are managing a brand strategy project, tracking the execution of a new marketing initiative, or keeping your team aligned on priorities across multiple workstreams, Updoot gives you one place where the strategic work stays visible and accountable. Your brand does not improve in the planning session. It improves through consistent execution week over week. Updoot makes sure that execution actually happens.

Key Takeaways

Schmitt's Consumer Model of Brands maps five stages of customer brand connection: identifying, experiencing, integrating, signaling, and connecting.

Customers do not just buy products. They buy identity, community, and meaning. Brands that communicate only features miss the deeper drivers of purchase decisions.

The sustainable shoe brand scenario illustrates how a genuinely good product can underperform when the marketing focuses on specifications rather than the identity and community the product represents.

Each stage of the model represents a distinct opportunity to improve how a brand communicates with and engages its customers.

Brand loyalty at the connecting stage is built through emotional, self-centered, and social engagement, not through transactions alone.

Consistent execution of brand strategy over time, managed through clear systems and accountability, is what separates brands that build lasting communities from those that remain a product looking for an audience.

Ready to bring more structure and execution to your brand strategy? See how Updoot helps teams turn plans into outcomes at updoot.com.