This document outlines a literature review and proposed research study on value creation practices in brand communities. It begins with an introduction to brand communities and a review of key literature on various practices that create value within brand communities, including social networking, impression management, community engagement, and brand use. The researcher then proposes to study the value creation practices within several Indonesian brand communities and how these practices benefit the brand, community, and members. The proposed method is to analyze online community data through netnography. The findings could provide insights on how brand owners can influence value creation practices.

1. Value Creation Practice in Brand
Community
Reza Ashari Nasution, PhD
School of Business and Management
Institut Teknologi Bandung
National Marketing Conference, Prasetya Mulya Business School, Jakarta, 14 February 2013

5. Outline
1. Research Background
2. Literature Study
3. Research Method
4. Findings and Discussion
5. Conclusion and Managerial Implication
6. Further Research
7. References

6. RESEARCH BACKGROUND

7. Overview of Brand Community
• A brand community is a specialized, non-
geographically bound community, based on a
structured set of social relationships among
admirers of a brand.
• Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) found the that
brand communities are social entities that
reflect the situated embededness of brands in
the day-today lives of consumers and the
ways in which brands connect consumer to
brand, and consumer to consumer

8. Brand Community Research
• McAlexander, Schouten, and Koenig (2002) reveals
insights that add to prior research in four important
ways:
▫ expands the definition of a brand community
▫ treats vital characteristics of brand communities, such as
geotemporal concentrations and the richness of social
context, as dynamic rather than static phenomena,
▫ demonstrates that marketers can strengthen brand
communities by facilitating shared customer experiences in
ways that alter those value creation practices and
▫ yields a new and richer conceptualization of customer
loyalty as integration in a brand community.
•

9. • In 2005, Muniz and Schau explored the
grassroots brand community centered on the
Apple Newton. Their study was conducted to
examine how a grassroots brand community
responds to the loss of the brand upon which it
is centered and what this response reveals about
the relationship between brand communities,
technology, and the magico-religious.

10. • Mathwick, Wiertz, and Ruyter (2007) examined
the relational norms that determine social
capital, an intangible resource embedded in and
accumulated through a specific social structure.
The social structure examined in this study is a
virtual community created upon text-based
conversations oriented toward peer-to-peer
problem solving (P3).

11. • Schau, Muniz, and Arnould (2009) revealed the
process of collective value creation within brand
communities. The researchers induced 12 value-
creating practices across the nine brand
communities they studied. They further organize
these practices into four thematic categories:
social networking, impression management,
community engagement, and brand use.
•

12. Value Creation Practice
• very important for further elaboration of brand
and consumer relationship in society
• put community-driven brand building in a more
systematic manner
• help us understanding how brand building and
anti-brand building activities take place in a
brand community

13. Research Problems
• Empirical findings about those value creation
practices are still rare.
• It is not known whether:
▫ different brand communities perform similar
value creation practices,
▫ value creation practices benefit brand and
consumer development in the communities and
▫ brand owners can influence the value creation
practices for maximum development of their
brands

14. LITERATURE STUDY

15. Brand and Consumer
• Brand is defined in American Marketing Association as a name,
term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to
identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and
to differentiate them from those of competitors.
• The initial identity attached to a brand is developed by the company
as the brand originator. But, the overall identity of the brand is
made by the entire stakeholders (company, supplier, and
supplementary).
• Nowadays, brand becomes incorporated into the customer’s self
identity and has a prominent role in defining and communicating
complicated and important identity project to others (Schau and
Gilly, 2003).
• In a consumer society, brand becomes a part of the non-verbal
language of social identity because the consumer’s consumption is
routinely implicated and connected with the identity (Patterson and
O’Malley, 2002)

16. • Consumers progressively own the brand and use
its symbolic benefits.
• The interaction with a particular brand is
experienced by many consumers who then
interact with each other and communicate to
share values and experiences. Later development
of this interaction forms brand community
(Cova and Pace, 2006)

17. Brand Community Development
• A brand community is made up of brand and
some entities and the relationship among them.
• A brand community tends to be identified on the
basis of commonality or identification among
their members, whether a neighborhood, an
occupation, a leisure pursuit, or devotion to a
brand.
• A brand community is not geographically bound.

18. • Through brand community, people share essential
resources that may be cognitive, emotional, or material
in nature (McAlexander et al., 2002).
• People gather in the same brand community tend to
have same values and beliefs that they have toward
something (Davidson et al., 2007).
• This builds commitments to the brand and the
community in the absence of corporate advertising and
promotion (Muniz Jr. and Schau, 2007).
• Members of brand community are quite active in
promoting the existence of the brand that they love.
Brand communities can lead to formation of vigilante
marketing (Muniz Jr. and Schau, 2007)

19. Salient Brand Characteristics
According to Muniz and Schau (2007), the followings are salient brand
characteristics that can create brand community:
• 1. Well-defined brand image: A well-defined brand avoids confusion
among its users thus offering clear image to be promoted and embraced in a
community.
• 2. Expressive hedonic culture: Brand communities have been shown to
form more readily around brands that are rich in expressiveness and
hedonic qualities.
• 3. Rich and lengthy history: Brands that have long history, usually
already considered to have more stable quality and worth as a center of a
brand community. The history brings some reputations that are boasted by
its members.
• 4. Publicly consumed: If the brands are publicly consumed by people in
a certain group, it can attract significant number of members to share ideas
about the brand and to collectively build the brand.
•

20. Value Creation Practice
• Schau et al. (2009) induced 12 value-creating practices across
the nine brand communities they studied. They further
organize these practices into four thematic categories:
▫ Social networking (SN): (1) welcoming, (2) empathizing, and (3)
governing.
▫ Impression management (IM): (1) evangelizing and (2) justifying.
Members act as altruistic emissaries and ambassadors of good
will when practicing these activities. Various impression
management practices are evident in the extant brand
community literature.
▫ Community engagement (CE): (1) staking, (2) milestoning, (3)
badging, and (4) documenting.
▫ Brand use (BU): (1) grooming, (2) customizing, and (3)
commoditizing.
•

21. Brand Community Value
• As an individual, members can receive social and emotional support from
the others, which will further create a friendship among them that will
surely make the entertainment (Ridings and Gefen, 2004; Maloney-
Krichmar and Preece, 2005; Johnson and Ambrose, 2006).
• Wang and Fesenmaier (2004) found that community members will get a
sense of satisfaction and pride when helping each other and will create a
good relationship and trust.
• Maloney-Krichmar and Preece (2005) indicated that community members
can interact anytime anywhere they want. Having easy and good access,
community member interaction will have no limit in time and places which
is very useful for members to fulfill their needs.
• Millen et al. (2002) mentioned positive impacts of brand community to
companies as follows:
▫ Employees who were involved in many activities in brand community will gain
better value than those who were not.
▫ Increasing the business and innovating of products.
▫ Increase the employees knowledge. w about the product issued by a company
▫ Can protect its brand

22. Figure 1. The relationship between practices of value creation and their common anatomy in
brand community
CE
SN IM
BU
Figure 1. The relationship between practices of value
creation in brand community

23. • The practices in brand community have effects on both
the community and the brand.
• Practices in brand community endow participants with
cultural capital.
• Practices, especially community engagement practices,
present opportunities for individual differentiation
through adroit performance.
• Practices also produce a repertoire for insider sharing.
• Practices provide participants with an almost
inexhaustible source of shared insider jargon and modes
of representation, which enhance consumers’ brand
experience.

24. Research Questions
• What are value creation practices in Indonesia
brand communities?
• What are the benefits to the brand, community
and members?

25. RESEARCH METHOD

26. • Community selection: based on Muniz and Schau’s
criteria
• Two types of brand community:
▫ Brand-based: HDCI, BMWCCI, HPCI and Star Wars
▫ Product-based: Polygon Xtrada 5 and Canon EOS 1000D
• Data collection: netnography (Kozinets, 2010)
▫ Became a member of the community
▫ Studied all postings and documentations
▫ Participated in the community’s events
▫ Interview with community members
• Data analysis: grounded research coding, content
analysis and pattern matching

27. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

28. Findings
Community Type SN BU CE IM
Harley Davidson Club of Indonesia Brand-based V V V V
BMW Car Club of Indonesia Brand-based V V V V
Harry Potter Club of Indonesia Brand-based V V V V
Star Wars Brand-based V - V -
Polygon Xtrada 5 Product-based V V V -
Canon EOS 1000D Product-based V V V -

29. • As expected, Social Networking is the first and foremost value creation
activity
• Community Engagement is prevalent in all community, indicating that it is
an extension of social networking activities
• Brand community with CE activity tend to have more activities in the
future. It also triggers the new member flow to conduct SN activity.
• Brand Use is visible when the brand community involves the use of a
product
• Members with active participation in CE will share more information about
BU
• CE will likely happen to members who experience a good environment of
brand use
• Member whose motivation to BU is stronger than CE will be less interested
to conduct IM. Therefore, CE is very important antecedent to IM
• Impression Management tends to happen when a brand community has an
effective CE activity and when it has received a cult status

30. Revised Model
CE
SN IM
BU

31. CONCLUSION AND MANAGERIAL
IMPLICATIONS

32. Conclusions
• The main motivation for joining a brand community is to
exercise Social Networking activity
• Members are divided into two groups: those with strong
motivation to be engaged in the community and those
who just want to know how to use a product
• Positive experience in both community engagement
activities and brand use will trigger more member to
come to the brand community, making it bigger and
stronger
• Brand community with good community engagement
practice will have a potential to conduct impression
management activity

33. Managerial Implications
• Brand community will bring positive influence to
company. The minimum advantage is to create
awareness.
• Positive experience in brand use and community
engagement will make the community larger, so
company must help the community to create a good
environment for sharing brand usage and sponsor the
community’s engagement activities
• Company involvement in the community engagement
activities will help the company to create free brand
campaign from the community in terms of impression
management
• Companies must monitor the community activity and
decide with whom they want to engage

34. FURTHER RESEARCH

35. Ideas for Further Research
• Conduct a quantitative research
• Measure the correlation between activities
• Longitudinal study
• More brand communities and more contrasting
conditions of the community
• Brand community equity model

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38. THANK YOU