Hope Jensen Schau

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.

The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds Collective Innovation in the Age of Networked Marketing

Past theories of consumer innovation and creativity were devised before the emergence of the profound collaborative possibilities of technology. With the diffusion of networking technologies, collective consumer innovation is taking on new forms that are transforming the nature of consumption and work and, with it, society and marketing. We theorize, examine, dimensionalize, and organize these forms and processes of online collective consumer innovation. Extending past theories of informationalism, we follow this macro-social paradigm shift into grassroots regions that have irrevocable impacts on business and society. Business and society need categories and procedures to guide their interactions with this powerful and growing phenomenon. We classify and describe four types of online creative consumer communities—Crowds, Hives, Mobs, and Swarms. Collective innovation is produced both as an aggregated byproduct of everyday information consumption and as a result of the efforts of talented and motivated groups of innovative e-tribes.

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.

When Differences Unite: Resource Dependence in Heterogeneous Consumption Communities

Although heterogeneity in consumption communities is pervasive, there is little understanding of its impact on communities. This study shows how heterogeneous communities operate and interact with the marketplace. Specifically, the authors draw on actor-network theory, conceptualizing community as a network of heterogeneous actors (i.e., individuals, institutions, and resources), and examine the interplay of these actors in a mainstream activity-based consumption community--the distance running community. Findings, derived from a multimethod investigation, show that communities can preserve continuity even when heterogeneity operates as a destabilizing force. Continuity preserves when community members depend on each other for social and economic resources: a dependency that promotes the use of frame alignment practices. These practices enable the community to (re)stabilize, reproduce, and reform over time. The authors also highlight the overlapping roles of consumers and producers and develop a dimensional characterization of communities that helps bridge prior research on brand communities, consumption subcultures, and consumer tribes.

Consumer Identity Renaissance: The Resurgence of Identity-Inspired Consumption in Retirement

Using multimethod data, we investigate retirement as a life stage centered on consumption, where cultural scripts are particularly contested and in flux and where we witness an increase in breadth and depth of identity-related consumption, which we term consumer identity renaissance. While prior research on older consumers focuses on corporeal and cognitive decline and its impact on individual decision-making situations, our attention is drawn to the competency and growth potential of those who have exited their formal productive stage and privilege consumption as a means to create and enact identity. Contrary to the received view of older consumers simply reviewing and integrating their already developed identities, we find retirement can be a time of extensive identity work with multiple revived and emergent inspirations weaving across all time orientations (past, present, and future) and involving intricate consumption enactments.

The context of experience

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and cultural aspects of the context that frames service exchange to better understand how value and experience are evaluated. Design/methodology/approach – The authors apply a conceptual approach to develop and propose a framework for deepening the understanding of the context of market-related experiences. The authors integrate two growing streams of research – consumer culture theory and service-dominant logic – that focus on phenomenological and experiential views on value and extend the context of experience with a culturally rich, service-ecosystems view of markets. Findings – The authors broaden the context of experience by applying a service-ecosystems perspective and identify four social and cultural factors that influence experience from this extended context – sign systems and service ecosystems; multiplicity of structure and institutions; value-in-cultural-context; and co-construction of context. Based on this, the authors point towar...

The Role of Brands and Mediating Technologies in Assembling Long-Distance Family Practices.

Increasingly, circumstances such as divorce, employment commuting, and military service have resulted in the geographic dispersion of family networks, and this reality holds both risks and opportunities for brands, products, and services embedded in family life. The authors leverage a longitudinal design including group interviews (initial/follow-up) and participant diaries to track how families’ consumption practices shift in response to separation, morphing across time and place to retain and strengthen family bonds. Their findings generate a framework that explains how and when colocated consumption practices reassemble through technologies across distances. The framework considers practice dimensions, separation type, motivation, potential/realized capacities, and mobilized technologies to forecast potential practice trajectories under conditions of extended separation. Five potential trajectories emerge: no trial, heroic quests, failed trial, easy translations, and sacred pieces. The authors’ discussion of managerial implications provides suggestions to enable companies to anticipate trajectories and take action to enhance brand use and loyalty to ensure that their brands survive reassembly within existing family practices or become integral to new family practices that feature the brand.

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.

The Co-Creation of Value-in-Cultural-Context

Abstract Purpose This chapter explores the nature of the cultural context that frames value creation and provides insight to the way in which value is collaboratively created, or co-created, in markets. Methodology/approach We develop a conceptual framework and research propositions for studying the co-creation of value-in-cultural-context through the intersection of consumer culture theory (CCT) and service-dominant (S-D) logic and the integration of a practice-theoretic approach for value co-creation. Research implications The integration of CCT, S-D logic, and practice theory provides a conceptual framework for studying the co-creation of value among multiple stakeholders and the (re)formation of markets. Practical implications Drawing on this framework, marketers can contribute to the co-creation of new markets by influencing changes in cultural contexts – practices, norms, meanings, and resources – that frame value co-creation and exchange. Originality/value of chapter This chapter explores the integration of CCT and S-D logic by focusing on value co-creation and applying a practice approach to further weave together these distinct research areas. In addition, the proposed framework elaborates the conceptualization of value-in-context to consider the cultural context that influences and is influenced by the co-creation of value.

Culture and Co-Creation: Exploring Consumers’ Inspirations and Aspirations for Writing and Posting On-Line Fan Fiction

This paper explores how consumers use the media products of mass culture to co-create the meanings of popular culture. Specifically, we examine both why and how Harry Potter fans utilize the primary texts written by J. K. Rowling to co-create their own fan fiction. Towards this end, we utilize Kenneth Burkes dramatistic method to explore the pattern of literary elements in both the original texts and the fan fiction. We argue that the primary impetus for consumers to engage in the co-creation of these texts is found in their ability to emphasize different ratios of literary elements in order to express their individual and collective desires. Through this process, fans utilize and contribute to the meta-textual meaning surrounding these primary focal texts and propel the original products of mass culture to the cultural texts of popular culture.