Brand Community

What it is

The definition, in the authors' words, is of "a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand", and the three markers are shared consciousness, a sense of belonging to the same group rather than merely owning the same thing; shared rituals and traditions, the practices that carry the group's history; and a sense of moral responsibility, felt obligation to the group and its members.

The method, in their words: the article "uses ethnographic and computer mediated environment data to explore characteristics, processes, and particularities of three brand communities", those centred on the Ford Bronco, the Macintosh and the Saab.

The correction this page exists for. There is no comparison group and no purchase measure in that paper, and it claims none. The commercial proposition the trade hangs on it, that building belonging creates loyalty and therefore sales, is not in the document.

The second founding paper created a sharper problem. James H. McAlexander, John Schouten and Harold Koenig recentred the community on the customer in 2002, describing a brand community from a customer-experiential perspective as a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated. Their stated fourth contribution is "a new and richer conceptualization of customer loyalty as integration in a brand community". Loyalty is therefore not measured as a consequence of integration; it is defined as integration. The authors present that openly as a conceptual advance, which is what makes it a teaching case rather than a gotcha, and it also means no sales figure can disconfirm it.

The best account of what members actually do adds no revenue either. Hope Jensen Schau, Muniz and Eric Arnould identified twelve common practices across nine communities, in four thematic aggregates, through which consumers realise value beyond what the firm anticipates. The value there is value realised by consumers in the practice, and the paper reports no revenue. Nine communities is a great deal of ethnography, and no quantity of ethnography is a control group.

Reading level, stated because it bounds everything above: every peer-reviewed study named on this page was read at the level of its publisher-deposited abstract, because the full texts are closed.

In effect

In research: who is actually inside one

Karen Nelson-Field, Erica Riebe and Byron Sharp compared two fast-moving consumer goods brands' Facebook fan bases with those brands' actual buyer bases. The buyer bases followed the ordinary negative binomial spread of heavy and light buyers; the fan bases were, in their words, "skewed in an opposite pattern, skewed toward the heaviest buyers". Two brands is two brands, and both in one category. On that measurement the people inside a brand community are disproportionately the people who were already buying the most.

In the field: what happens when joining is assigned

Rene Algesheimer and colleagues ran a year-long field experiment at eBay Germany in which an email invitation significantly raised participation in the firm's own community. Their finding: "Community participation did not translate into increased behaviors, as would be commonly expected. Although there is no impact of participation on the number of bids placed or the revenue earned, there is a negative impact of participation on the number of listings and the amount spent." Their reading is more interesting than a null and it is theirs: participants became more selective and efficient sellers and more conservative in their bidding. One firm, one market, 2010, a marketplace rather than a shop, and four routes to the full text failed, so no sample size, model or coefficient is held.

In commerce: the best positive result, with its own caveat

Puneet Manchanda, Grant Packard and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah found "a significant increase in customer expenditures attributable to customers joining the firm's community" at a multichannel entertainment products retailer, with posters generating more than lurkers and the informational channel null. Their own caveat is the sentence the trade never quotes: "While self-selection is a concern with field data, we rule out multiple alternative explanations." That is a respectable achievement and it is not randomisation. The magnitude usually attached to the paper could not be recovered from either abstract on two passes and is not printed.

What it does not say

It does not say brand communities are not real. They are real social objects with a describable structure, and the founding ethnographies describe it well.

What the founding literature does not contain is evidence that a firm can build one and thereby create spending it did not already have. The one randomised test of that proposition came out negative, and the observational studies that find gains are studies in which the spenders volunteered to join.

It does not say the positive results are worthless. Transaction-data studies using propensity score matching with difference in differences report higher visit frequency and higher profitability, with the effect greatest for customers who already had a strong relationship with the firm and bought premium products. On its own terms that describes an amplifier on existing patronage.

It also does not supply the trade's headline figure. The range a manager is likeliest to have met, that customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 to 40 per cent more, comes from a 2011 consultancy brief whose attached evidence is a single sentence about a survey of more than three thousand consumers, with no sample frame, categories, questionnaire or comparison design published anywhere. There is no academic paper behind it and the brief does not claim one.

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