182 Seven brand approaches
The Sacramento Jaguar Club is introduced as:
We are a group of people who enjoy the company of other JAGUARenthusiasts.
We enjoy dining together, driving our cars together and attending various
events together. Whether you now own a JAGUAR, would like to own a
JAGUAR, or you once owned a JAGUARyou are welcome to join us for fun,
feasting, and general merriment.
(Jaguar Clubs of North America, http://www.jcna.com)Googling ‘Apple user groups’ results in more than 16 million hits, indicating the
enormous interest consumers have in the sharing of their Apple consumption
experiences with other Apple users.
Consumers form communities around brands. In brand communities, a brand is
the focal point of social interaction among passionate consumers. These consumers
use the community to share their brand experiences and brand stories. Brand
communities may rest entirely on consumer interaction, while others are more or
less facilitated by a marketer, but they tend to evolve and thrive around old brands
with an interesting history and high involvement products such as cars, motor
cycles and computers. Brand communities can be a very powerful force affecting
brand value, because the meaning found in the social engagement – the ‘dining’,
‘fun’ and ‘feasting’ of the Sacramento Jaguar Club or the exchange of user tips in
Apple user groups – in brand communities adds significantly to brand loyalty.
Brand communities have existed for long in practice. The ‘breakthrough’ research
article on the subject was ‘Brand community’ by Muñiz and O’Guinn (published in
2001 in Journal of Consumer of Research). This publication constituted the
conceptualization of the brand community in the context of brand management.
This chapter offers insights into the assumptions, key theoretical elements
and methods of the community approach and finishes off by providing the
managerial guidelines.
Assumptions of the community approach
The brand approaches of the 1990s (the consumer-based approach, the personality
approach and the relational approach) dealt with the exchange between one
marketer and one consumer. All three approaches fundamentally changed the tradi-
tional notion of brand equity as something created entirely in the domain of the
marketer. The personality approach and the relational approach further constituted
brand value as something co-created in a dialogue between marketer and consumer
(the ‘dyadic’ brand relationship). The community approach adds meaning found in
the social interaction amongdedicated brand consumers (the ‘triadic’ brand rela-
tionship) to the theories of how brand value can be created: ‘The brand communities
are social entities that reflect the situated embeddedness of brands in the day-to-day
lives of consumers and the ways in which brands connect consumer to brand, and
consumer to consumer’ (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001, p. 418). In other words, the
existence of a brand community alsorequires interaction between consumers.