BRAND COMMUNITY FORMATION: A CRITICAL REVIEW.

A brand community from a customer-experiential perspective is a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated. Crucial relationships include those between the customer and the brand, between the customer and the firm, between the customer and the product in use, and among fellow customers. The authors delve ethnographically into a brand community and test key findings through quantitative methods. Conceptually, the study reveals insights that differ from prior research in four important ways: First, it expands the definition of a brand community to entities and relationships neglected by previous research. Second, it treats vital characteristics of brand communities, such as geotemporal concentrations and the richness of social context, as dynamic rather than static phenomena. Third, it demonstrates that marketers can strengthen brand communities by facilitating shared customer experiences in ways that alter those dynamic characteristics. Fourth, it yields a new and richer conceptualization of customer loyalty as integration in a brand community.

2011

Current view on brand community conceptualizes the construct as a collection of highly homogeneous members despite some recent evidence that community members might be heterogeneous. Extant scholars call for more research to establish sources of such heterogeneity. This article shows that members of a brand community e.g. fans of a sports club, can be meaningfully segmented into clusters based on relationships that consumers may have with a brand community e.g. with the product, brand, organization, and other consumers. Using data from a large survey, we apply cluster analysis techniques to meaningfully segment the fans of a sports club. Further, based on arguments from sports marketing literature, we establish that these clusters can vary significantly in terms of their psychological underpinnings like different motivations to consume sports.

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2018

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of social media brand communities to brand loyalty. This paper aims to stress the role of the brand in that relationship, suggesting a conceptual model in mass-market products in which consumers' engagement in social media brand communities, brand identity, and consumer-brand identification are related to brand outcomes, such as trust and loyalty. A qualitative analysis was conducted, through in-depth interviews with experts and focus group discussions with consumers, so as to evaluate their experience with brands on social media. The findings indicated that in mass-markets, consumers engaged in social media brand communities may develop positive attitudes towards the brand, such as trust and loyalty, and that consumer-brand identification may have a fundamental role in transforming consumer-brand community interactions into consumer-brand relationships.

Brands are increasingly perceived as social entities that affect the ways in which consumers relate to each other, and there is a growing interest in consumer groups that support or oppose a given brand, referred to in marketing literature as brand or anti-brand communities. Although the concept of communities has been examined in the sociology literature for some time, there is very little integration of the sociology and the marketing literature when brand and anti-brand communities are examined. Furthermore, brand and antibrand communities have largely been approached as different phenomena in the marketing literature. This paper is trying to redefine brand communities and to identify antecedents, internal functioning and consequences of these communities. Using knowledge from the sociology and marketing literature, it argues that brand and anti-brand communities are intrinsically more similar than different. Therefore, they can both be described with the term brandrelated communities and they should be approached by researchers and practitioners as similar rather than different phenomena.

IGI Global eBooks, 2020

The Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 2011

Brand community research has gained prominence over the past decade due to the increasing complexities of modern business and the goal of remaining profitable. As a result, "more and more companies are attempting to build deep, meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers" (Bhattacharya and Sen 2003, p. 76). In an effort to foster such relationships, researchers have proposed a communal approach to consumption (Cova and Pace 2006). A classic example of this community-based consumption is the subculture formed by Harley-Davidson devotees . were drawn to the thought that a single product (i.e., the Harley-Davidson motorcycle) defined a distinctive, homogeneous, and enduring subculture. The behavior of consumers driven by similar passions to form a group has come to the forefront as an object of study with relevance for marketing researchers (Cova and Pace 2006). The study of brand communities has revealed (in the aggregate) that these specialized subcultures enable an organization to better communicate, establish, and foster rich consumer relationships. Moreover, such relationships have been found to significantly and positively affect consumer behavior (e.g., .

Journal of Business Research, 2020

In the past two decades there has been a growth in the rate at which consumers join, companies use, and researchers study brand communities. Given the expansion of brand communities, scholars insistently analyze why individuals join and stay in them. However, no study concurrently examines the links among the members' integration, participation and commitment to a brand community. Furthermore, research conceive brand communities as homogenous. Whether the feelings and behaviors of members of different kinds of communities, and specifically consumer-run and company-managed brand communities, are comparable is unknown. Using a sample of 2,167 consumers of a leading motorcycle brand, this study examines the members' integration, participation and commitment to consumer-run and company-managed communities. The findings reveal that consumer-run communities stimulate higher levels of integration, participation and commitment than the companymanaged communities, but that the mechanisms connecting integration, participation and commitment are invariant across the two types of community.