Building Brand Community
[ABSTRACT READ IN FULL at the Crossref item record. FULL TEXT NOT READ: Unpaywall records oa_status 'closed' with no repository copy anywhere] McAlexander, J. H., Schouten, J. W., & Koenig, H. F. (2002). 'Building Brand Community.' Journal of Marketing, 66(1), 38-54. doi:10.1509/jmkg.66.1.38.18451. their move is to recentre the community on the customer. 'A brand community from a customer-experiential perspective is a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated', the crucial relationships being customer to brand, customer to firm, customer to product in use, and customer to fellow customers. The method, in their words: 'The authors delve ethnographically into a brand community and test key findings through quantitative methods.' They claim four advances, and the fourth is the one the article must deal with: 'Fourth, it yields a new and richer conceptualization of customer loyalty as integration in a brand community.' THE CRITICAL READING, AND IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT IN THE SECTION: loyalty is not measured as an outcome of community integration, it is redefined as community integration. The authors present that as a conceptual contribution, which it is. But it means the design cannot in principle find that community failed to produce loyalty, because being integrated in the community is the loyalty. Their third claim, that 'marketers can strengthen brand communities by facilitating shared customer experiences in ways that alter those dynamic characteristics', is a claim about strengthening the community and not about strengthening the till. The criticism is of an identity between construct and outcome, and of nobody's character.
[ABSTRACT READ IN FULL at the Crossref item record. FULL TEXT NOT READ: Unpaywall records oa_status 'closed' with no repository copy anywhere] McAlexander, J. H., Schouten, J. W., & Koenig, H. F. (2002). 'Building Brand Community.' Journal of Marketing, 66(1), 38-54. doi:10.1509/jmkg.66.1.38.18451. their move is to recentre the community on the customer. 'A brand community from a customer-experiential perspective is a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated', the crucial relationships being customer to brand, customer to firm, customer to product in use, and customer to fellow customers. The method, in their words: 'The authors delve ethnographically into a brand community and test key findings through quantitative methods.' They claim four advances, and the fourth is the one the article must deal with: 'Fourth, it yields a new and richer conceptualization of customer loyalty as integration in a brand community.' THE CRITICAL READING, AND IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT IN THE SECTION: loyalty is not measured as an outcome of community integration, it is redefined as community integration. The authors present that as a conceptual contribution, which it is. But it means the design cannot in principle find that community failed to produce loyalty, because being integrated in the community is the loyalty. Their third claim, that 'marketers can strengthen brand communities by facilitating shared customer experiences in ways that alter those dynamic characteristics', is a claim about strengthening the community and not about strengthening the till. The criticism is of an identity between construct and outcome, and of nobody's character.
Written from the aBSTRACT READ IN FULL at the Crossref item record. FULL TEXT NOT READ: Unpaywall records oa_status 'closed' with no repository copy anywhere.
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McAlexander, J. H., Schouten, J. W., & Koenig, H. F. (2002). 'Building Brand Community.' Journal of Marketing, 66(1), 38-54. doi:10.1509/jmkg.66.1.38.18451