early 1990s. While driving these cars, we were frequently stopped by
complete strangers who wanted to talk to us about our Saabs, the brand’s
history, where we had them serviced, and our advice on very Saab-centric
problems. We quickly came to realize that these weren’t complete strangers
stopping us; they were fellow members in a community of Saab enthu-
siasts. When we looked at the behaviours of these self-proclaimed Saab-
ists, we realized that they were a lot like the Apple Macintosh enthusiasts
that we had encountered at various points of our lives. We also realized that
the fields of branding and consumer behaviour, as they existed then, could
not adequately explain this phenomenon. The social aspects of
consumption, particularly with regard to the consumption of brands, were
almost completely unexplored. Thus a research calling was revealed.
Brand research had been bound up in what was a sometimes useful, but
very limited, idea of brands as summations of attitudes. To be clear: it was
an unarguably impoverished view of brands. It was worse than incomplete.
It did not and could not properly capture the social nature of brands.
Brands are about meaning: meaning clearly left open by summations of
attitude. Further, brand meaning derives from society, its forces, agents,
and institutions, among them marketers and consumers. It is an essentially
communal process.
What we saw among users of brands reminded us of what we saw in
cohesive neighbourhoods: a sense of community. We began to think that
community might be a useful way to think about the relationships between
users or admirers of brands. As we thought about it more, and collected
more data, and read more of the classical sociological literature on
community, we became convinced that we were on to something. Human
beings living in consumer cultures aggregate around brands in a manner
similar to those occurring in traditional face-to-face communities. It was a
novel idea that made perfect sense.
Obvious cases came first. In our earliest work we studied mostly small-
share brands. We initially gave some the impression that brand communities
occurred only with a small fraction of consumers and represented marginal
populations. More than a decade later we are delighted to observe that the
brand community construct and its application have proven to be quite
mainstream in both theory and application. Social network marketing, often
through brand communities, is now commonplace. Large-share multina-
tional brands (as well as start-ups) now use the construct, the essential
dynamics we revealed (e.g. desired marginality, communal legitimacy,
oppositional brand loyalty, the communication structures of communities,
essential communal metaphors, communal co-creation, community-
generated content, narratives and language). We are honoured through our
modest connection to canonic social thought.204 Seven brand approaches