1. r an d !
B
unities
c o m m
Henri Weijo

2. Who?
• Henri Weijo
• 2002-2008 MsC. in
Marketing
• Doing my PhD on
consumption
communities::
Communities of
consumption: Why
they come together,
stay together, grow
and begin to fall
apart

3. Brand communities
• Brand
communities
continue to be a
hot topic in
marketing
• I’ll go through a
bit of their history
and academic
underpinnings

4. community!

5. What’s a ”community?”
• A seemingly straightforward idea, but it’s
actually one of the most debated
concepts in ALL social sciences
• It has puzzled philosophers like Weber,
Durkheim and Mauss with no clear
consensus emerging
• First emerged in the English language in
the 14th century

6. Tönnies’ ”ideal” dichotomy
• Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1887) : gemeinschaft
und gesellschaft  community and society
• ”Society” refers to groups sustained by
instrumentality to their members’ aims and
goals (mechanical, contractual, rational)
• ”Community” refers to groups that are held
together by feeling of togetherness and
mutual bonds (natural, serendipitious)

8. Some characteristics
• There are some common characteristics we
have come to know about communities
• Thorne (2006): membership…shared
location…shared cultural practices and
values… interpersonally meaningful
relationships…commitment…reciprocity…
collective goods and resources…sense of
shared identity…generally social
formations that are durative over time

9. Some characteristics
• However, they are contested
• For example, virtual communities
(Rheingold, 1993) for example severely
problematizes the notion of ”place” in
communities
• And of course, consumption communities
are just the tip of the iceberg in terms
these ”new” types of communities

10. 1. Consciousness of kind
2. Shared rituals and
traditions
3. Sense of duty and moral
obligation
Muniz & O’Guinn (2001)

12. Communality?
• There are two competing views on
whether we are becoming more or less
communal (as a whole)
• The ”less” crowd says traditional
communities are under threat (e.g.
”Bowling Alone”)
• The ”more” crowd embraces new forms
of community (e.g. Maffesoli ”Neo
Tribes”)

13. What’s a ”community?”
• ”Community” is a typically priviliged and
idealized account in social sciences (e.g.
Etzioni, 1995)
– ”What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike
all other terms of social organization (state,
nation, society, etc.) [community] seems never to
be used unfavourably” (Williams, 1976)
• Some claim the concept has become so
diluted it means nothing and everything
(e.g. Fernback, 2007)

14. ”We need more
communality in
Finland!”

16. Consumption communities
• Consumption communities have become
a staple topic in the field of consumer
culture theory (CCT)
• We’ve learned of brand communities
(Saab), subcultures of consumption
(Harley Davidson), fan communities (Star
Trek), brand cults (Apple) and others

17. Consumption communities
• However, these are not
just different names for
the same phenomena
• There are distinct
differences between
them
• How they interact is a
major dividing issue

18. Consumption communities
• For example, subcultures have certain
similarities with brand communities
(e.g., shared ethos, acculturation
patterns, status hierarchies)
• However, subcultures usually go against
society and culture at large, often in a
anti-commercial ethos

20. Consumption communities
• Brand communities, on the other hand,
embrace society at large
• They often also have a pro-market ethos
(Muniz & O’Guinn 2001)  NOT always!

21. !Brand
communities!
”Community is formed around one good or service,
not many. They are explicitly commercial social
collectives centered around a brand, not incidental
contact with commercial space. […] This is about
brands. This is the tie that binds.”
Muniz & O’Guinn 2001

22. Brand communities
• Academic interest in brand communities
started to emerge in the mid 90s
• But thanks to the online age, the interest
has boomed
• Brand communities have become an
integral part of marketing strategies

23. Brand communities
• ”Liberated from geography” (Wellman,
1979) and ”influenced by a mass-
mediated sensibility” (McLuhan, 1964)
• Brand communities are imagined
communities  (Boorstin 1974) “created
and preserved by how and what men
consumed.”
• Explicitly commercial social collectives
centered around a brand

24. How do brand communities form?
• It usually requires a rather strong or even
iconic (dare I say niche?) brand to get a
community going
• If the brand has a strong competitor or
seems somehow ”under threat”, the
better
• Apple, Saab, Jeep, Harley Davidson,
Holga,

25. ”All of this highlights the active role
brand community members have in the
social construction of brand meaning,
and thus the brand. This involves
accommodation, negotiation, text
rejection, interpretation, evaluation, and
use of communal symbol systems. In our
brand communities, the marketer is often
regarded as having too much say in the
brand's future. The brand's very
ownership is contested.”
Muniz & O’Guinn (2001)

26. So why are
brand
commmunities
important?

27. Marketing purpose of BC’s
• It’s very ”marketing du jour” to speak of
involving your consumers through ”co-
creation” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000; Prahalad and Ramaswamy,
2002; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b)
• Brand communities are an obvious target
for these efforts, because that’s where
your consumers are

29. Marketing purpose of BC’s
• Brand communities are seen as a source
for (marketer perspective):
– New ideas (speeding up R&D)
– word of mouth (or basically, marketing)
– even free labour
(Zwick et al 2008)

30. ”[Brand] community is a potent
strategy if it is approached with
the right mind-set and skills. A
strong brand community increases
customer loyalty, lowers marketing
costs, authenticates brand
meanings, and yields an influx of
ideas to grow the business.”
Fournier & Lee (2009)

32. Different types of communities
• People (and managers in particular)
sometimes forget that all brand
communities are alike
• Some are closer to the company or even
maintained by them (e.g. Cova & Pace
2006)
• Some are loosely organized and very
”far” from the company (e.g. Jenkins
2006; Ludicke 2006)

36. Different types of communities
• Right now brand communities have
become a tad synonymous with online
communities
• However, the online element is only a
slice of the community life
• In fact, communities that meet physically
are more likely to be stronger (generally
speaking)

38. Fournier & Lee (2009)
• Fournier & Lee list 7 myths of brand
communities (from a marketer’s
perspective)
• Published in Harvard Business Review

40. • MYTH: A brand community
is a marketing strategy
• REALITY: A brand
community is a business
strategy

41. • MYTH: A brand community
exists to serve the business
• REALITY: A brand
community exists to serve
the people in it

42. Schau et al 2009:
• Brand community practices:
– endow participants with cultural
capital (and create competition)
– produce a repertoire for insider
sharing
– generate consumption opportunities
– evince brand community vitality

45. • MYTH: Build the brand, and
the community will follow
• REALITY: Engineer the
community, and the brand
will be strong

48. QUESTION: In what kind of
(if any) community are YOU
a member in or are aware
of?

49. • MYTH: Brand communities
should be lovefests for
faithful brand advocated
• REALITY: Smart companies
embrace the conflicts that
make communities thrive

51. • MYTH: Opinion leaders
build strong communities
• REALITY: Communities are
strongest when everyone
play a role

53. ... (2) which will 1. Keep these guys
attract a following for happy, or at least
the brand… tolerant of the brand
by defending the
populist world and its
ethos
... (3) and the rest will
follow Holt 2004

54. • MYTH: Online social
networks are the key to a
community strategy
• REALITY: Online networks
are just one tool, not a
community strategy

56. • MYTH: Successful brand
communities are tightly
managed and controlled
• REALITY: Of and by the
people, communities defy
managerial control

57. Other best practices
• Pretesting marketing
communications/products within the
community
• Making the community members
feeling like exclusive customers
• Increasingly, increasing
transparency about the organizatio
to create trust

58. Other best practices
• Knowledge sharing, educating
• But overall, just being there and
listening (I think) is the best practice
for brand communities right now
• If you don’t know how to engage
your consumers, you might do more
harm than good by going in

59. Where are BC’s going?
• The ”hot topic” status of brand
communities may have hurt the
academic discussion a bit
• Now everything is a brand
community
• The term is being thrown around
loosely

60. Where are BC’s going?
• Marketers aren’t entirely without
fault here, either
• Some communities have had to
resist cooptation and are not
necessarily too enthusiastic about
this newly found interest

61. Where are BC’s going?
• Is it enough that consumers ”know”
there are ”others like me” how like
the brand?
• When is a consumption practice a
ritual, when just ”the way you use
it”?

62. !RESEARCHER: Why do you think [the
community] is holding together?!
!PARTICIPANT: Well, relating to that
I’m going to be quite cynical and say
and it’s staying together because of
the old flame. [...] And I’m not
really surprised, because I think the
for discussion forums as such has
passed. People aren’t as such
interested in discussion forums, but
the discussion forums that were born
during their boom period, they have
this sort of staying power and
they’re going to be up and running
for as long as the active members are
willing to feed it.!

64. Conclusion
• Brand communities: hot topic both in
management and in academia
• ”Community” a very loaded and
troubled concept philosophically
• But as future marketers, right now I
think the best practice is to be
”there”… watching and learning

65. Researching brand communities
• Ethnography
(particularly
netnography) a key
approach
• However, some really
interesting quantitative
approaches as well, for
example network
analysis

66. Researching brand communities
• If you’re interested in
doing a master’s thesis
on brand communities
(or any consumption
community), the
department has a lot of
expertise in
supervising the work