Notesale: Turn your study into money

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St Edmund Hall
“
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many consumers now actively form
larger communities around their favourite brands
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” (Cova &
White, 2010)
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Community activity is the ‘biggest change in business in 100 years’ (Ahonen and
Moore, 2005), and as such has gained increasing attention from marketers
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Essentially brand communities are built on the belongingness hypothesis –
human beings have a pervasive drive to form and maintain interpersonal relationships,
and these can be established through consumption
...
Whether these communities form of their own accord, or are
organized and controlled by brand management, there are major implications for
marketers – groups of people brought together by their love of a particular brand are
an extremely powerful tool in generating sales, through both the conversion of nonmembers and repeat buying of members
...
There have also been many examples of success, such as Apple, whose
‘cult’ grew in the late 1970s and 1980s, and as the rise of the internet has taken over,
the movement of brand communities online has equally produced positive results
...

There has been a general movement in marketing over the last few decades away
from an economics-derived logic, in which the firm and the customer are separate and
discrete, and towards a view of co-creation, with consumers collaborating in the
innovation process and becoming endogenous to the firm
...
Schau et al (2009) write that there are four thematic
categories of ‘practices’ that occur within such communities, and it is the
development of these practices that an emergent sense of membership and identity
arises
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For example, community
engagement in fostered when milestoning is combined with badging, and is part of the
overall documentation process
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The effects of these practices evolve over time as consumer engagement deepens
and practices are integrated, they present opportunities for consumers to differentiate

St Edmund Hall
themselves due to their brand knowledge and encourage competitive spirit
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Therefore I think it makes perfect sense that ‘creating a new
sense of belonging is what the most successful marketers are striving for’
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Despite having less than 4% of the market in 2005,
Macintosh customers have always been distinguished by their fierce loyalty to the
brand and personal identification with Apple Macs
...
The idyllic
story of Jobs and Wozniak’s creation of Apple, through to Jobs’ rise and fall within
the company and its eventual resurrection from its widely rumoured demise fits easily
with Cambbell’s 1991 formula for the ‘Heroic Adventure Myth’
...
How successful
this is however is debateable due to the low market share, although with the
introduction of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in recent years, Apple has become an
increasingly bigger market player, much of it potentially down to its army of loyal
advocates
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With Facebook having 500 million
users and Linkedin having 100 million in 2011, as well as Twitter with 106 million
users in 2010, the consumer reach of these sites makes them obvious targets for
marketers to explore
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Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) have identified three common
markers to each brand community, which are consciousness of kind, shared rituals
and traditions, and moral responsibility
...
There is
a common set of values and behaviours, such as the use of jargon, and experience
discussions about ads, product placements and the use of Canon products for special
occasions are common
...
The company itself enhances learning by providing
members with a daily challenge in which they can compete for the best pictures
...

Therefore this shows that marketers are able to create brand communities without the
enormous effort of building and owning online platforms, or promoting independent
websites
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As shown by Canon, it is certainly possible to
create a sense of belonging online
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As such, the level of brand
community integration is much higher for offline marketing activities as opposed to
online, and relationships between customer and product, customer and brand,
customer and company, and customer and other owner are stronger through these
activities
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The introduction of online brand communities can also have a
detrimental effect – Ewing et al (2013) found that with the movement of the historial
rivalry between Ford and Holden in Australia to online spaces, the increased
conversations denigrated to more primitive and profane exchange, possibly driven by
the perceived safety of anonymity
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This began as a group of
Harley Davidson owners, but they are not in favour of the company’s goals, and
convey brand information in a non-company intended way
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O
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, Hell’s Angels still very much exists, and
it is easily argued that the movement of the community online has allowed it to not
only continue but to grow, with worldwide event postings and media links
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There has been some success, with Apple at the forefront, although often these
communities are more bottom-up than top-down
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While some argue that offline activities are more successful than online, there
is no denying the appeal of the widespread consumer reach of online brand
communities, and with internet use set to increase in the future this is a shift that is
still underway
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References:
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Belk, R
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and Tumbat, G
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T
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E
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H
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’ Journal of Business Research, 66(1), 4-12

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Muniz, A
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jr
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C
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J
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(2009) ‘How brand community practices create value’,
Journal of Marketing, 73(5), 30-51

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Stokburger-Sauer, N
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27(4), 347–368

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Zaglia, M
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(2013), ‘Brand communities embedded in social networks’,
Journal of business research 66(2), 216-223



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