James H. McAlexander

Building Brand Community

A brand community from a customer-experiential perspective is a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated. Crucial relationships include those between the customer and the brand, between the customer and the firm, between the customer and the product in use, and among fellow customers. The authors delve ethnographically into a brand community and test key findings through quantitative methods. Conceptually, the study reveals insights that differ from prior research in four important ways: First, it expands the definition of a brand community to entities and relationships neglected by previous research. Second, it treats vital characteristics of brand communities, such as geotemporal concentrations and the richness of social context, as dynamic rather than static phenomena. Third, it demonstrates that marketers can strengthen brand communities by facilitating shared customer experiences in ways that alter those dynamic characteristics. Fourth, it yields a new and richer conceptualization of customer loyalty as integration in a brand community.

Subcultures of Consumption: An Ethnography of the New Bikers

This article introduces the subculture of consumption as an analytic category through which to better understand consumers and the manner in which they organize their lives and identities. Recognizing that consumption activities, product categories, or even brands may serve as the basis for interaction and social cohesion, the concept of the subculture of consumption solves many problems inherent in the use of ascribed social categories as devices for understanding consumer behavior. This article is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with Harley-Davidson motorcycle owners. A key feature of the fieldwork was a process of progressive contextualization of the researchers from outsiders to insiders situated within the subculture. Analysis of the social structure, dominant values, and revealing symbolic behaviors of this distinct, consumption-oriented subculture have led to the advancement of a theoretical framework that situates subcultures of consumption in the context of modern consumer culture and discusses, among other implications, a symbiosis between such subcultures and marketing institutions. Transferability of the principal findings of this research to other subcultures of consumption is established through comparisons with ethnographies of other self-selecting, consumption-oriented subcultures.

Loyalty: The Influences of Satisfaction and Brand Community Integration

This paper empirically explores the relative impacts of satisfaction, brand community integration, and consumer experience on customer loyalty as expressed by future purchase intentions and behavior. Data drawn from qualitative research and a survey of 1000 patrons of a Native American casino who indicate a willingness to engage in formal marketing relationships indicate that satisfaction yields to brand community integration as a key driver of loyalty. We discuss important implications of the findings for marketing theory and practice.

Claiming the Throttle: Multiple Femininities in a Hyper-Masculine Subculture

This feminist re‐examination of an ethnography of Harley‐Davidson motorcycle owners uncovers a world of motivations, behaviors, and experiences undiscovered in the original work. The structure and ethos of subculture are understood differently when examined through the lens of feminist theory. Through the voices of women riders in a hyper‐masculine consumption context we discover perspectives that cannot easily be explained by extant theory of gender and consumer behavior. We find women engaging, resisting, and co‐opting hyper‐masculinity as part of identity projects wherein they expand and redefine their own personal femininities. This study reveals invisible assumptions limiting the original ethnography and thus reiterates the problems of hegemonic masculinity in the social science project.

Building a University Brand Community: The Long-Term Impact of Shared Experiences

ABSTRACT Relationship marketing has made its way into the practices of university administrations. With it have also arrived many problems associated with the aggressive use of CRM technologies. One particularly effective and healthy approach to relationship marketing in higher education is to treat the university, with all of its stakeholders, as a brand community, and to pursue policies and programs to strengthen the relationships that define the community. With this paper, we examine an important class of relationship often neglected in the CRM literature, i.e., the relationships among the customers who support the brand and who ultimately give it its meaning and vitality. Specifically, we explore how the nature of relationships among students affects their long-term loyalty to a university. The results of a telephone survey of university alumni demonstrate the importance of certain types of university experiences on student relationships and, thereafter, on loyalty to their alma mater and their intentions to support the university in the future.

The marketization of religion: field, capital, and consumer identity

Certain institutions traditionally have had broad socializing influence over their members, providing templates for identity that comprehend all aspects of life from the existential and moral to the mundanely material. Marketization and detraditionalization undermine that socializing role. This study examines the consequences when, for some members, such an institution loses its authority to structure identity. With a hermeneutical method and a perspective grounded in Bourdieus theories of fields and capital, this research investigates the experiences of disaffected members of a religious institution and consumption field. Consumers face severe crises of identity and the need to rebuild their self-understandings in an unfamiliar marketplace of identity resources. Unable to remain comfortably in the field of their primary socialization, they are nevertheless bound to it by investments in field-specific capital. In negotiating this dilemma, they demonstrate the inseparability and co-constitutive nature of ideology and consumption.

University Experiences, the Student-College Relationship, and Alumni Support

ABSTRACT University administrators have begun to more aggressively adopt many of the techniques associated with relationship marketing. This would seem like a perfect strategy for a university as loyal alumni can do such things as offer personal recommendations to help build enrollments, participate in alumni functions, purchase university-branded products, and enroll in professional education courses. However, there are many unexamined questions regarding the nature and impact of alumni relationships with the university. This paper explores the impacts of the alumni-university relationship and alumni assessments of their college experiences on important expressions of loyalty. A sample of alumni who had graduated three to eight years prior to the study completed a telephone survey. The results provide support for the impact of these variables on current behavior and behavioral intentions. Implications of these findings for university marketers are discussed.

Positioning Services for Competitive Advantage: the Case of Duds ‘n Suds

Examines the concept of differentiating product offerings, including consumer services, and positioning them in relation to customer needs and perceptions. Approaches the subject of service positioning via an interesting case study. Concludes with recommended guidelines for the positioning of consumer services, but notes that a case study, whilst a source of interesting insights, is limited since itsobservations may not necessarily be true for other service businesses.

Addressing the Wicked Problem of American Gun Violence: Consumer Interest Groups as Macro-social Marketers

Building on work on social and macro-social marketing, we provide an empirical account of ways in which American gun violence prevention groups (GVPGs) act as macro-social marketers as they address the wicked problem of gun violence, which they define as deaths and injuries with firearms. We find that, as a collective, GVPGs attempt to change the culture related to guns by targeting up-, mid-, and downstream agents. We contribute to theory by (1) expanding the concept of macro-social marketing beyond government entities to include consumer interest groups and collectives; (2) introducing internal marketing as a macro-social marketing tool critical for macro-social marketers dependent largely on volunteers; (3) elucidating ways that macro-social marketers can accomplish upstream changes indirectly, by encouraging consumers and citizens to influence policy makers; and (4) revealing marketing tactics that can be leveraged across up-, mid-, downstream, and internal efforts.

Advancement in higher education: the role of marketing in building philanthropic giving

This paper empirically explores ways in which marketers of higher education can contribute to the important task of cultivating alumni philanthropy. Advancement professionals understand that philanthropy is influenced by wealth and affinity. As marketers, we anticipate that our contribution resides with investments in building affinity. Using survey data that measure the affinity of alumni of a large US university who have been commercially screened to reveal individual wealth, this paper provides empirical evidence of the relative contributions of affinity and wealth to giving. Logistic regression analysis reveals that affinity has a greater impact on predicting the likelihood of giving than other variables, including prior giving and wealth. Important to marketers, this study emphasizes the importance of building affinity and also uncovers obstacles to affinity formation. This information can be used to bridge and repair alumni relationships with their alma mater and inform segmented marketing communications to foster alumni enthusiasm for giving.