Brand Community

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Introduction

A community is made up of its member entities and the relationships among them. Communities tend to be identified based on commonality or identification among their members, whether a neighborhood, an occupation, a leisure pursuit, or devotion to a brand. Through communities, people share essential resources that may be cognitive, emotional, or material in nature.

Brand communities are communities whose primary bases of identification are either brands or consumption activities, that is, whose meaningfulness is negotiated through the symbolism of the marketplace.




Definition

“A brand community is a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand.” It, like other communities, is characterized by qualities like a shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility. However, as it is centered around a branded good or service, everything is situated within a commercial and mass mediated ethos.

Characteristics of brand communities

Like other communities, brand communities are marked by a shared consciousness, rituals and traditions and a sense of moral responsibility. Each of these qualities is, however, situated within a commercial and mass-mediated ethos, and has its own particular expression.

Consciousness of kind

The most important element of Brand community is consciousness of kind. Members share a we-ness. Members feel an important connection to the brand, but more importantly, they feel a stronger connection toward one another. The consciousness of kind found in brand communities transcends geographic boundaries. It is also characterized by a few processes like legitimacy and oppositional brand loyalty

Legitimacy is a process whereby members of the community differentiate between true members of the community and those who are not, or who occupy a more marginal space. In the context of brands this is demonstrated by really knowing,” the brand as opposed to using the brand for the wrong reasons. The wrong reasons are typically revealed by failing to fully appreciate the culture, history, rituals, traditions, and symbols of the community.

Brand communities are generally open social organizations in that they do not deny membership, but like most communities, they do have status hierarchies. Ostensibly, anyone who is devoted to the brand can be a member of the community, regardless of ownership. However, the devotion to the brand must be sincere and for the right reasons. Legitimacy is however not a necessary condition in all brand communities.

Oppositional brand loyalty is another social process involved in perpetuating consciousness of kind. Through opposition to competing brands (Coke vs. Pepsi), brand community members derive an important aspect of their community experience, as well as an important component of the meaning of the brand. This serves to delineate what the brand is not, and who the brand community members are not.

Rituals and Traditions

Rituals and traditions represent vital social processes by which the meaning of the community is reproduced and transmitted within and beyond the community. They are typically centered on shared consumption experiences with the brand and maintain the culture of the community.

Some of the rituals and traditions include celebrating the history of the brand and sharing brand stories. Advertisements play an important role in brand community rituals and traditions. Members are particularly concerned with advertisements as they represent the brand to those outside of the community, as well as to themselves.

The preservation of what the brand is and stands for is important to the brand community. Members often feel that they have a better understanding of the brand than the manufacturer does. They can be, and frequently are, critical of various aspects of the brand and/or its management. Brand community members play an active role in the social construction of brand meaning through accommodation, negotiation, text rejection, interpretation, evaluation, and use of communal symbol systems. Often the marketer is regarded as having too much say in the brands future and the brands very ownership is contested. Thus, these rituals and traditions represent an important aspect of consumer agency, and point to the social negotiation between marketer and consumer in constructing a brands meaning.

Moral responsibility

Moral responsibility is a sense of duty to the community as a whole, and to individual members of the community. This sense of moral responsibility is what produces collective action and contributes to group cohesion. A prime concern among brand communities being that of survival, moral responsibility includes Integrating and Retaining Members.

Brand Communities are intentional, voluntary, and partial in the level of involvement they engender and commitment is narrowly defined. Members are united predominantly by their common interest in a brand. Brand communities are defined in contra distinction to one another and gain their identity by their most apparent differences from one another.

Some other characteristics of brand communities are

· They are not restricted by geography.

· They are explicitly commercial; exist in full view, with communal self-awareness and self-reflexivity.

· Brand communities are less ephemeral and their members as more committed. Brand communities can be relatively stable groupings, with relatively strong (but rarely extreme) degrees of commitment.



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