Imagine wearing exactly the same cosy casual clothes in three situations: relaxing on your sofa on Sunday evening, spending a normal day in a creative agency, or attending a job interview at an investment bank.
The clothes have not changed.
But the signal has.
Comfortable clothing may communicate relaxation and privacy at home, authenticity and informality in a creative workplace, and a lack of professionalism in a highly formal business setting. This rather ordinary example points to a fundamental problem in how we think about signals: they may not have context-independent meanings at all. Their meaning emerges from the social situation in which they are produced, observed, and interpreted — and that situation is not a fixed container. Social practices themselves reproduce, contest, and sometimes transform the context that gives those practices meaning. Brands are a particularly powerful class of such signals, which raises an uncomfortable question for brand research: when we compare brands across product categories, organizational types, and behaviors, are we actually comparing the same thing? Or are we, carefully and with excellent statistical hygiene, comparing apples and oranges?
What Does a Signal Actually Mean?
Signaling theory is concerned with situations in which information is asymmetrically distributed: one actor possesses qualities or intentions that another cannot directly observe, and signals help bridge this informational gap (Connelly et al., 2011). But the existence of a signal does not guarantee a single interpretation. A suit, a university degree, a price, a certification, a brand name — what they mean depends on who sends them, who observes them, and under what circumstances. That idea has deep sociological roots.
Goffman (1959) treats social behavior as situated performance: actors present themselves before particular audiences within a particular definition of the situation.
The same behavior can therefore acquire different meanings in different settings. Bourdieu takes the argument a step further. Social space is not merely the background against which signals are interpreted; fields are structured spaces of positions, relations, forms of capital, and taken-for-granted rules of the game that shape what actors perceive as possible, appropriate, or even thinkable (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990). Crucially, this relationship is reflexive. The field structures practice, while practice simultaneously reproduces or transforms the field. What counts as appropriate office dress is not fixed by something called „office culture“ — it is continuously produced by people dressing, evaluating one another, hiring, promoting, sanctioning, imitating, and occasionally violating conventions. Enough legitimate actors wearing cosy casual clothing to the office do not merely adapt to a dress code. They can gradually rewrite it.
The same applies to brands: they operate within socially structured spaces of meaning, but their practices also participate in structuring those spaces. A signal does not simply pass through context —
Signal × Social Context → Interpretation → Social Meaning
— it feeds back into it:
Social Structure → Practice → Signals → Interpretation → Social Meaning → Practice → Social Structure
The arrows turn back on themselves. The meaning of a signal at time t partly reflects accumulated practices at t−1, while today’s signaling practices contribute to the field in which tomorrow’s signals will be interpreted.
Why Doesn’t Airbus Foot Cream Work?
Brand-extension research provides a fairly blunt illustration. Imagine three products: Porsche yoghurt, Airbus foot cream, a Donald Trump smartphone. All could carry highly recognizable brands, yet the extensions do not feel equally plausible. Aaker and Keller (1990) demonstrated long ago that strong brand equity cannot be transferred automatically into arbitrary categories — consumers evaluate whether the parent brand’s associations plausibly fit the extension. Porsche signals engineering excellence and driving experience; none of that gives you a reason to prefer Porsche yoghurt. Airbus represents mastery of complex technological systems; none of that makes Airbus foot cream compelling. The signal remains strong. Its meaning simply refuses to travel.
The Trump smartphone illustrates something different. There is no obvious reason a political and personal brand should signal technological competence in phone design. Yet a branded smartphone can still make social sense if the relevant signal is not competence but identity — not this brand knows how to make excellent phones, but this is a phone for people like me. Functional fit and social fit are not the same thing, and from a reflexive perspective, successful extensions can do more than exploit an existing fit: they can change the field of meanings attached to the brand itself. What begins as incongruent practice may, under the right conditions, restructure expectations rather than merely violate them.
What Does It Mean to Act Through a Brand?
This is where brand attachment enters. Park et al. (2010) distinguish attachment from merely holding a strong positive attitude — attachment concerns the connection of the brand to the self, its cognitive and emotional prominence. That distinction changes the theoretical question. Instead of only asking what does this brand tell me about the product?, we can ask what does acting through this brand tell me and others about myself? Brand attachment connects signaling to identity, and at least three kinds of congruence become relevant:
- Functional fit — can this brand credibly deliver this product or service?
- Institutional fit — is this signal appropriate for an actor of this organizational kind?
- Identity fit — is acting through this brand consistent with who I am, or want to be recognized as?
None of these three should be read as fixed properties. They are themselves products of previous practice. What appears institutionally incongruent today may become normal tomorrow if legitimate actors repeatedly enact it — and, just as easily, practices can damage an established fit by challenging what audiences believe an organization of that kind should be. Fit is not merely a condition of signaling. Signaling practices participate in producing fit.
Does Competence Help or Hurt a Nonprofit?
A recent study by Ashoori, Johnson, and Vlasova (2025) offers a genuinely useful test case, and what it demonstrates is well established, not merely suggested. In a between-subjects experiment (N = 377, U.S. adults recruited via MTurk), participants evaluated a fictitious brand — a restaurant in one condition, a food bank in the other — that either received no additional framing or was described with low or high emphasis on its „non-dominant“ trait: warmth for the for-profit, competence for the non-profit. The interaction between organization type and framing was significant (F(2, 371) = 3.28, p = .007), though modest in size (partial η² ≈ .03). Pushing warmth for the restaurant raised evaluations from M = 6.00 to M = 6.43 (p = .014). Pushing competence for the food bank lowered evaluations from M = 6.44 to M = 6.03 (p = .031) — precisely the opposite of what a naive „shore up your weak trait“ strategy would predict.
The authors‘ own explanation is not vague hand-waving about „too business-like“ — it is a specific, falsifiable mechanism with a name: non-profits occupy what stereotype-content research calls the paternalistic quadrant (high warmth, low competence), and donor support for that position is conditional on the organization appearing to need help. When a non-profit signals high competence, self-sufficiency, or financial robustness, it risks a perceived-need paradox: donors infer the cause is doing fine without them, and support declines — the same dynamic Laidler-Kylander et al. (2007) documented when large, well-funded charities found that publicizing their financial strength reduced individual giving. Competence, in other words, does not merely fail to help a non-profit here — the study’s own data show it can specifically undermine the one thing (perceived need) that motivates the donor’s willingness to act.
A second study, using the same design plus a self-reported political-ideology measure, confirmed this effect was not uniform: it held strongly among more liberal respondents (a swing of roughly −0.51 on the competence-emphasis contrast) and essentially disappeared among more conservative respondents (a swing of about −0.15, not significant). That is itself a small demonstration of the argument this essay has been building: the same „competence“ signal does not travel identically across audience segments, let alone across national fields — a caveat worth flagging, and one the authors themselves raise, given this sample is entirely U.S.-based, self-reported, and built on a single fictitious brand pair (a restaurant and a food bank).
What the study cannot tell us is whether that boundary is historically stable — and here the essay steps past the data into a plausible but undemonstrated extension. If nonprofits increasingly borrow codes from the commercial field, they may gradually shift the symbolic boundaries of the nonprofit field itself: what reads as „too business-like“ today could, through repeated legitimate practice, become the new baseline of what competent humanitarian action looks like tomorrow. Ashoori et al. give us a precise snapshot of the current field. They cannot, by design, tell us whether that field is currently moving — that claim belongs to Bourdieu’s reflexive logic, not to their data.
Can We Even Hold the Signal Constant?
This creates a genuine methodological problem. Experimental research reasonably tries to hold everything else constant — ceteris paribus. But what if social context changes the meaning of the supposedly constant variable? We may manipulate the identical competence signal across two organizational conditions and believe we have controlled for everything that matters. Socially, however, participants may not be receiving the same signal at all: one group reads competence → professional capability, another reads competence → professional capability + commercial orientation. The manipulation is objectively identical and socially non-equivalent.
The problem runs deeper once context is understood dynamically, because the categories against which respondents evaluate signals are themselves historical products of prior practice. Today’s „nonprofit stereotype“ is not an exogenous constant — it is the accumulated residue of what nonprofits, donors, volunteers, governments, and media have repeatedly done and recognized as legitimately nonprofit. This suggests we should distinguish measurement equivalence from something deeper: social commensurability. We can measure warmth, competence, trust, or attachment on identical scales across contexts; that does not mean a one-unit difference represents the same social phenomenon. Ceteris paribus becomes theoretically dangerous exactly where we hold observable characteristics constant while their meanings are quietly changing underneath us.
Is Donating Just Buying with Extra Steps?
This matters because theories developed for consumer brands get applied to nonprofit behavior almost by default. Economically, buying and donating look similar: a person allocates scarce resources, weighs information and reputation, incurs opportunity costs, forms intentions, behaves. Both fit the same shorthand — Brand → Attitude → Intention → Behavior. Sociologically, they are different acts entirely. A commercial exchange is dyadic: Consumer → Company → Consumer benefit. I transfer resources because I expect something back. Charitable giving introduces a triadic structure: Donor → Nonprofit → Beneficiary. I transfer resources primarily so that someone else receives the benefit.
Chapman et al. (2022), synthesising a systematic review of 1,337 studies, argue that charitable behavior cannot be adequately understood by examining donors, beneficiaries, or fundraisers in isolation.
The nonprofit brand sits in the middle of that triangle. It does not merely identify the producer of something I want to consume — it mediates a relationship between myself and someone else. That changes what the brand can signal. A commercial brand tells me this company will reliably deliver something valuable to me. A charitable brand tells me this organization can be trusted to turn my resources into something valuable for somebody else — and beyond that, this is a legitimate way to help, people like me support organizations like this, supporting this organization says something about who I am. Signaling theory explains why such signals become valuable under uncertainty; Charitable Triad Theory describes the relational structure within which they get interpreted; brand attachment explains how the organizational brand becomes connected to the donor’s self. But the relationship runs both ways: by donating, volunteering, or refusing to do either, donors also participate in reproducing or revising the social meaning of the organization and its brand. A nonprofit brand is simultaneously structured and structuring.
Does „Trust“ Even Mean One Thing?
Consider four superficially similar statements: I trust Porsche. I trust my bank. I trust the Red Cross with my donation. I trust the Red Cross with my blood. Psychometrically, all four might load onto a single construct called trust. Socially, they describe entirely different relationships. Trusting Porsche concerns engineering quality and physical safety. Trusting a bank concerns stewardship of financial resources. Trusting a nonprofit with a donation concerns the transformation of money into benefit for others. Trusting the same organization with my blood concerns my body — a medically embodied resource, not a fungible one. The word stays constant. The object of trust does not.
This becomes sharper once we look across the range of behaviors nonprofits try to enable. Money is fungible; time is not; blood is embodied. Volunteering transfers time, labor, and a slice of social identity. Activism puts reputation and public identity at stake. A legacy transfers resources beyond one’s own lifetime and can represent a form of identity continuity. These are not merely different dependent variables — they are different social situations of resource transfer, and the same brand may signal different things in each: stewardship for monetary donations, institutional competence and safety for blood donation, belonging for volunteering, values and social identity for activism, continuity of self for legacies. The brand has not changed. The situation in which its signals get interpreted has — and, once again, the causal arrow runs both ways. Repeated donation behavior establishes an organization as a legitimate charitable intermediary; volunteering reproduces a collective identity; public advocacy repositions a humanitarian brand within moral space; withdrawal of support weakens legitimacy. Behavior is not merely the endpoint of the brand process. It feeds back into the conditions under which future signals will be read.
What Would a Non-Linear Model of Brand Equity Look Like?
The familiar causal shorthand — Brand Equity → Intention → Behavior — hides not only an interpretive layer but a feedback loop. A fuller architecture would run:
Brand Resources → Signals → Contextual Interpretation → Social Meaning → Motivation → Intention → Enactment → Social Recognition → Reproduction/Transformation of the Field → Future Contextual Interpretation
Or, compressed to its core: Field → Brand → Signal → Meaning → Practice → Field. Brand equity is partly a product of prior social practice, and it provides resources for subsequent signaling; those signals get interpreted through socially structured categories that enable or inhibit further practice; and accumulated practice reproduces or alters the very categories through which the brand will later be understood. In Bourdieusian terms, structure and practice are not independent causal blocks — the structured social space generates practices that, through their enactment and recognition, participate in reproducing or transforming that space.
Brand attachment sits at a particularly interesting point in this loop. It need not be just another item on a longer brand-equity scale; instead, it may mark the point where an external symbolic resource becomes connected to the self. That gives three analytically distinct levels: Level Question Examples 1 — Signal What is observable? Competence, warmth, reputation, brand name, price, certification 2 — Contextual meaning What does this signal mean here? Professionalism, commercialism, solidarity, belonging, status 3 — Behavioral relevance What does this meaning imply for this actor, this action? Buy, donate, volunteer, give blood, advocate, bequeath
Attachment links Levels 2 and 3, because contextual meanings become behaviorally powerful once they concern not only what the organization is, but who I am in relation to it. But the individual’s action then loops back to the social level: displaying attachment, donating publicly, or identifying with a brand sends signals to other actors in turn. The individual does not merely internalize socially produced brand meanings — through practice, the individual participates in producing them.
So What Travels and What Doesn’t?
Constructs travel; their social meaning does not necessarily travel with them. Awareness remains awareness, competence can still be measured as competence, trust can still form a statistically coherent latent construct, attachment can still be measured reliably — and none of that establishes that these constructs perform equivalent social functions across contexts. That is a problem of commensurability, not measurement. A scale can tell us that two people report the same amount of trust; it cannot, by itself, establish that what is being entrusted is socially equivalent. Nor can a cross-sectional measurement capture the reflexive process through which today’s practice constitutes tomorrow’s context. If your framework treats brand equity as… …then you are implicitly assuming Practical consequence a fixed stock of value in the consumer’s mind measurement invariance = social equivalence Cross-category / cross-sector comparisons risk apples-to-oranges conclusions purely a driver of individual behavior the field is a static backdrop Repeated brand practice that reshapes stereotypes goes undetected context as a nuisance variable to control away ceteris paribus holds meaning constant The „controlled“ variable may quietly mean something different per condition a linear Brand → Attitude → Behavior chain no feedback from enactment to field You miss how donor/volunteer behavior itself reproduces or erodes institutional fit
This reframes brand equity itself: not a stock of value residing in people’s minds and later converted into behavior, but a reservoir of socially available signaling resources — a reservoir that behavior itself continually refills, depletes, or reshapes. Brands neither simply cause behavior nor merely reflect social context; they participate in a recursive process in which structures enable and constrain practice, while practice reproduces and transforms structure. Call it brand-enabled behavior.
For anyone running comparative brand research inside a federated, multi-country nonprofit three implications follow directly:
- Cross-country donor surveys that treat „trust“ or „competence“ as identical constructs across national fields should test for measurement and social invariance separately, not assume the first implies the second.
- Competence-forward campaign language („efficient,“ „professional,“ „well-run“) carries field-dependent risk for a humanitarian brand — what reads as reassurance in one national context may read as commercialization in another. Ashoori et al.’s own U.S. data suggest this risk is not even uniform within one national market: it concentrated among more liberal-leaning respondents and was statistically negligible among conservative ones, which should make anyone exporting a „competence“ message across ideologically or nationally distinct donor bases distinctly cautious.
- Repeated, legitimate professionalization by peer organizations is itself a lever: it can shift what „competent nonprofit“ means in a field, not just how one organization is perceived within an unchanged field.
Ashoori et al.’s (2025) finding may be more than evidence that nonprofit and for-profit brands respond differently to the same branding strategy. It may point to a general principle: a signal has no field-independent behavioral meaning. Fields structure how signals get interpreted, while signaling practices — and the behaviors they enable — participate in reproducing or transforming those very fields. If that is correct, comparing nonprofit and for-profit brand equity under ceteris paribus conditions requires more caution than it usually receives. We may successfully hold the signal constant while inadvertently changing its meaning. We may treat social context as constant while the practices we study continuously reproduce or revise it. We can control every measurable difference between the apple and the orange.
That does not make them the same fruit.
References
Aaker, D. A., & Keller, K. L. (1990). Consumer evaluations of brand extensions. Journal of Marketing, 54(1), 27–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299005400102
Ashoori, M., Johnson, Z. S., & Vlasova, O. (2025). Brand warmth and competence: Differential effects on for-profit and non-profit evaluations. Journal of Philanthropy, 30(4), e70031. https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.70031
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.
Chapman, C. M., Louis, W. R., Masser, B. M., & Thomas, E. F. (2022). Charitable Triad Theory: How donors, beneficiaries, and fundraisers influence charitable giving. Psychology & Marketing, 39(9), 1826–1848. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21701
Connelly, B. L., Certo, S. T., Ireland, R. D., & Reutzel, C. R. (2011). Signaling theory: A review and assessment. Journal of Management, 37(1), 39–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310388419
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Park, C. W., MacInnis, D. J., Priester, J., Eisingerich, A. B., & Iacobucci, D. (2010). Brand attachment and brand attitude strength: Conceptual and empirical differentiation of two critical brand equity drivers. Journal of Marketing, 74(6), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.6.1
Diss-Tance 