This feeling of ‘sort of knowing each other’ is characterized by and enhanced by
two aspects: ‘legitimacy’ and ‘oppositional brand loyalty’. ‘Legitimacy’ is based
on observations indicating that members have a feeling of other members either
being members for the right or the wrong reasons. As expressed by one community
member: ‘We’ are the members ‘really knowing’ how and why the brand should be
consumed, while ‘they’ consume the brand for the ‘wrong reasons’. ‘Oppositional
brand loyalty’ is the other characteristic that can enhance members’ ‘consciousness
of kind’. Brand community members underpin this sense of belonging by sharing
a dislike for competing brands. Macintosh community members tend to criticize
PCs and Microsoft, while in the Saab brand community, for instance, there is a
general tendency to put down the competing Swedish car brand, Volvo.
The second marker of community, ‘Shared rituals and traditions’ ‘typically focus
on shared consumption experiences with the brand. All the brand communities
encountered in this project have some form of rituals or traditions that function to
maintain the culture of the community’ (ibid., p. 421). These rituals include special
greetings, a celebration of the history of the brand, and sharing stories of the brand;
‘Storytelling is an important means of creating and maintaining community’ (ibid.,
p. 423). The storytelling aspect of the brand community can be very powerful. In
the case of the Apple Newton brand community ‘Supernatural, religious, and
magical motifs are common ... There are strong elements of survival, the mirac-
ulous, and the return of the creator’ (Muñiz and Schau 2005, p. 739).
The third marker of a brand community; ‘sense of moral responsibility’, ‘is a
sense of duty to the community as a whole, and to the individual members of the
community, and it ‘is what produces collective action and contributes to group
cohesion’ (ibid., p. 424); these characteristics were also displayed in the social
interaction around the three brands in question. The communities display moral
systems, but not in a very high-flown sense of the word – they do not relate to life-
and-death matters: ‘Moral systems can be subtle, and are highly contextualized.
Such is the case with brand communities’ (ibid.). These moral systems serve two
major purposes: the integration and retention of members and the assistance of
members in the proper use of the brand.
Brandfests, brand communities and community brands
The quintessential brand community pivots around an already existing brand and is
usually established and run by enthusiastic volunteers. However, the three markers
of community can also be observed at so-called brandfests, where a proactive
marketer establishes consumer interaction that can facilitate the evolvement of a
brand community. McAlexander et al.’s (2002) study of the intentional building of
brand communities offers insight into the possibilities of a proactive marketer. If the
marketer understands and respects the dynamics of a brand community it is possible
to proactively create a platform that facilitates a brand community to evolve: ‘Even
owners who came to events dwelling on how different they felt from others often left
after two or three days believing they belonged to a broader community that under-
stands and supports them in realizing their consumption goals’ (ibid. 2002, p. 42).
The community approach 189