This article introduces the idea of brand community. A brand community is a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Grounded in both classic and contemporary sociology and consumer behavior, this article uses ethnographic and computer mediated environment data to explore the characteristics, processes, and particularities of three brand communities (those centered on Ford Bronco, Macintosh, and Saab). These brand communities exhibit three traditional markers of community: shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility. The commercial and mass-mediated ethos in which these communities are situated affects their character and structure and gives rise to their particularities. Implications for branding, sociological theories of community, and consumer behavior are offered. C ommunity is a core construct in social thought. Its intellectual history is lengthy and abundant. Community was a prominent concern of the great social theorists, scientists, and philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g.

Using social practice theory, this article reveals the process of collective value creation within brand communities. Moving beyond a single case study, the authors examine previously published research in conjunction with data collected in nine brand communities comprising a variety of product categories, and they identify a common set of value-creating practices. Practices have an "anatomy" consisting of (1) general procedural understandings and rules (explicit, discursive knowledge); (2) skills, abilities, and culturally appropriate consumption projects (tacit, embedded knowledge or how-to); and (3) emotional commitments expressed through actions and representations. The authors find that there are 12 common practices across brand communities, organized by four thematic aggregates, through which consumers realize value beyond that which the firm creates or anticipates. They also find that practices have a physiology, interact with one another, function like apprenticeships, endow participants with cultural capital, produce a repertoire for insider sharing, generate consumption opportunities, evince brand community vitality, and create value. Theoretical and managerial implications are offered with specific suggestions for building and nurturing brand community and enhancing collaborative value creation between and among consumers and firms. Modern marketing logic, as derived from economics, advanced a view of the firm and the customer as separate and discrete; the customer is exogenous to the firm and is the passive recipient of the firm's active value creation efforts, and value is created in the factory (Deshpandé 1983). However, a different perspective is emerging. Research across disparate streams of management literature-from new product development, to services-dominant logic, to consumer culture theory-leads to the view that customers can cocreate value, cocreate competitive strategy, collaborate in the firm's innovation process (Etgar 2008; Franke and Piller 2004;Prügl and Schreier 2006;Von Hippel 2005), and even become endogenous to the firm (Jaworski and Kohli 2006;Kalaignanam and Varadarajan 2006; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004;Vargo and Lusch 2004). Despite the proliferation of such work, a consumer-centric delineation of the mechanism in which value is collectively created has not been identified, nor has a clear typology of cocreated value been developed. This article aims to address these issues.Consumer culture theory researchers have investigated a host of coproductive activities in consumer collectives organized around market-mediated cultural products (Muñiz (Szmigin and Reppel 2004). This work demonstrates that all such collectives exhibit community-like qualities, as understood in sociology, and address identity-, meaning-, and statusrelated concerns for participants. Moreover, this work suggests that such collectives provide value to their members through emergent participatory actions of multiple kinds and that consumer collectives are the site of much value creation.A revolution in both...

This research explores the grassroots brand community centered on the Apple Newton, a product that was abandoned by the marketer. Supernatural, religious, and magical motifs are common in the narratives of the Newton community, including the miraculous performance and survival of the brand, as well as the return of the brand creator. These motifs invest the brand with powerful meanings and perpetuate the brand and the community, its values, and its beliefs. These motifs also reflect and facilitate the many transformative and emancipatory aspects of consuming this brand. Our findings reveal important properties of brand communities and, at a deeper level, speak to the communal nature of religion and the enduring human need for religious affiliation. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

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This article describes an investigation of the American Girl brand that provides a more complete and holistic understanding of sociocultural branding. Recent research on emotional branding, together with prior work on brands' symbolic nature and their role as relationship partners, represents a significant shift in the way marketers think about brands and brand management. However, a full understanding of powerful and emotionally resonant brands has been elusive, in part because sociocultural branding knowledge has accumulated in a piecemeal way and lacks coherence and integrity. In addition, powerful brands are extraordinarily complex and multifaceted, but in general they have been studied from a single perspective in a single setting. On the basis of a qualitative exploration of the American Girl brand that is both deep and broad, the authors posit that an emotionally powerful brand is best understood as the product of a complex system, or gestalt, whose component parts are in continuous interplay and together constitute a whole greater than their sum. Studying American Girl from the perspectives of various stakeholder groups in many of the venues in which the brand is manifest, the authors attempt to close the sociocultural branding research loop and identify implications for brand management.