Albert M. Muñiz

How Brand Community Practices Create Value

Using social practice theory, this article reveals the process of collective value creation within brand communities. Moving beyond a single case study, the authors examine previously published research in conjunction with data collected in nine brand communities comprising a variety of product categories, and they identify a common set of value-creating practices. Practices have an “anatomy” consisting of (1) general procedural understandings and rules (explicit, discursive knowledge); (2) skills, abilities, and culturally appropriate consumption projects (tacit, embedded knowledge or how-to); and (3) emotional commitments expressed through actions and representations. The authors find that there are 12 common practices across brand communities, organized by four thematic aggregates, through which consumers realize value beyond that which the firm creates or anticipates. They also find that practices have a physiology, interact with one another, function like apprenticeships, endow participants with cultural capital, produce a repertoire for insider sharing, generate consumption opportunities, evince brand community vitality, and create value. Theoretical and managerial implications are offered with specific suggestions for building and nurturing brand community and enhancing collaborative value creation between and among consumers and firms.

Vigilante Marketing and Consumer-Created Communications

Consumers, acting independently of marketers and advertisers, have started creating and disseminating documents that strongly resemble, in form and intent, ads for the brands that they love. Employing a netnographic method, this paper investigates consumer-generated, commercially relevant artifacts by examining the brand community centered on the Apple Newton, a brand that was (along with its supporting advertising) discontinued in 1998. The members of the Newton community create commercially relevant content to fill the void created by the lack of advertising for the brand. These artifacts reflect tensions with the marketer, the market, and the community itself, and imbue the brand with powerful meaning. These data reveal that consumers can be quite skilled in the creation of brand-relevant communications, applying the styles, logics, and grammar of advertising. The ascendancy of consumer-generated content prefigures revolutionary changes in how advertising is defined and practiced.

American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research

This article describes an investigation of the American Girl brand that provides a more complete and holistic understanding of sociocultural branding. Recent research on emotional branding, together with prior work on brands’ symbolic nature and their role as relationship partners, represents a significant shift in the way marketers think about brands and brand management. However, a full understanding of powerful and emotionally resonant brands has been elusive, in part because sociocultural branding knowledge has accumulated in a piecemeal way and lacks coherence and integrity. In addition, powerful brands are extraordinarily complex and multifaceted, but in general they have been studied from a single perspective in a single setting. On the basis of a qualitative exploration of the American Girl brand that is both deep and broad, the authors posit that an emotionally powerful brand is best understood as the product of a complex system, or gestalt, whose component parts are in continuous interplay and together constitute a whole greater than their sum. Studying American Girl from the perspectives of various stakeholder groups in many of the venues in which the brand is manifest, the authors attempt to close the sociocultural branding research loop and identify implications for brand management.

A tale of tales: the Apple Newton narratives

This is a story about stories, a tale about tales, if you will. This is an account of the textual, oral and pictorial traditions of the Apple Newton brand community. Echoing the much longer and richer tradition of Irish storytelling, Newton users have constructed a tapestry of tales that interweave the personal and the commercial, the scientific and the artistic, and the factual and the mythical. These tales are full of intrigue, betrayal, and wanton unsanctioned fulfillment. They comprise a brand melodrama with symbolically rich and graphically intense user-created content. We have been embedded researchers in this community for nearly four years: one as a participant and the other as a known interloper. The stories we relay are meant for public consumption. They are publicly posted, in some cases communally authored, widely shared, interpreted, reinterpreted, deconstructed and analyzed within the community. They are tales that demonstrate the darker-side of the marketplace: when the marketer withdraws betraying loyal consumers and those same consumers refuse to go quietly to another market offering. The brand narratives are rebellious and irreverent and yet completely devoted. Wherever possible, we will rely on the words of the Newton community to tell the story, for they know it best. We will add constructive commentary where we can to flesh out the narrative’s contextual symbolism and community meaning for those less acclimated to this unique community.

Marketing artistic careers: Pablo Picasso as brand manager

Purpose – In recent years, scholars have begun suggesting that marketing can learn a lot from art and art history. This paper aims to build on that work by developing the proposition that successful artists are powerful brands. Design/methodology/approach – Using archival data and biographies, this paper explores the branding acumen of Pablo Picasso. Findings – Picasso maneuvered with consummate skill to assure his position in the art world. By mid-career, he had established his brand so successfully that he had the upper hand over the dealers who represented him, and his work was so sought-after that he could count on selling whatever proportion of it he chose to allow to leave his studio. In order to achieve this level of success, Picasso had to read the culture in which he operated and manage the efforts of a complex system of different intermediaries and stakeholders that was not unlike an organization. Based on an analysis of Picassos career, the authors assert that in their management of these powe...

The Benefits and Challenges of Collaborating with User Communities

OVERVIEW: User communities are potentially rich sources of new product ideas and innovations. However, accessing these communities brings significant challenges, including how to identify users, how to engage with them, how to integrate user innovations into corporate process, and how to manage intellectual property and other aspects of the relationship. The LEGO Groups experience engaging with user innovators, explored in a longitudinal study of the firms interactions with independent and corporate-sponsored user communities, illustrates both the challenges and the rewards of collaborating with user communities.

Temperance and religiosity in a non-marginal, non-stigmatized brand community

About the book: Marketing and consumer research has traditionally conceptualized consumers as individuals- who exercise choice in the marketplace as individuals not as a class or a group. However an important new perspective is now emerging that rejects the individualistic view and focuses on the reality that human life is essentially social, and that who we are is an inherently social phenomenon. It is the tribus, the many little groups we belong to, that are fundamental to our experience of life. Tribal Marketing shows that it is not individual consumption of products that defines our lives but rather that this activity actually facilitates meaningful social relationships. The social ?links? (social relationships) are more important than the things (brands etc.) The aim of this book is therefore to offer a systematic overview of the area that has been defined as ?cultures of consumption?- consumption microcultures, brand cultures, brand tribes, and brand communities. It is though these that students of marketing and marketing practitioners can begin to genuinely understand the real drivers of consumer behaviour. It will be essential to everyone who needs to understand the new paradigm in consumer research, brand management and communications management.