Review of Ouwersloot, H., & Odekerken-Schroder, G. (2008). Who‟s who in brand communities – and why? European Journal of Marketing, 42(5/6), 571-585

1. Literature Review Sample Series No.4 Prepared by Michael Ling
LITERATURE REVIEW SAMPLE SERIES
NO. 4
“Ouwersloot, H., & Odekerken-Schroder, G. (2008). Who‟s who in brand communities – and
why? European Journal of Marketing, 42(5/6), 571-585”
Prepared by Michael Ling
Email: msc_ling@yahoo.com.au
Note: Michael Ling is the sole author of this document. You’re welcomed to use its contents but,
as a courtesy, please quote the source of this paper http//www.michaelling.net/
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2. Literature Review Sample Series No.4 Prepared by Michael Ling
Research Problem & Objective
Brand communities are commonly perceived to exhibit a fair degree of homogeneity
among its members. The authors argue that current research fails to investigate the
heterogeneous elements within a community such as the various motivations that each member
has when he or she joins up. By naming and investigating four motivations that members might
have, the authors set out to explore the relative importance that members attach to their various
relationships (McAlexander et al., 2002) within a community. The possible segments in a
community are then identified by cluster analysis based on the relative strengths of these
relationship constructs. The four motivations and their corresponding community relationships
are as below.
1. “Quality assurance” to “Customer-to-company relationship”.
2. “High involvement in products” to “Customer-to-product relationship”.
3. “Joint consumption” to “Customer-to-customer relationship”.
4. “Symbolic function of brand” to “Customer-to-brand relationship”.
Sampling
The authors have selected two communities in their research - one being the community
of players of the board game Settlers of Catan, the other the Belgian and Dutch members of the
“Swatch the club”.
The authors have not adopted any probability sampling and, instead, used haphazard
sampling in collecting data for their research, which is likely to produce “ineffective, highly
unrepresentative samples” (Neuman, 2006). For example, regarding the Settlers of Catan
community, the authors state that they “visited these four tournaments and asked participants to
complete the self-administered questionnaires”. As there are twelve Dutch tournaments, the
authors have merely covered one-third of their targets.
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3. Literature Review Sample Series No.4 Prepared by Michael Ling
As the authors have not provided size estimates of the two brand communities, there is no
basis upon which to justify the adequacy and representativeness of the two samples. The authors
have not used any sampling plans for the two communities. The collected samples (and response
rates) are 104 respondents (81 percent) and 125 respondents (22 percent) from the Settlers of
Catan and “Swatch the club” respectively. Regarding such significant low response rate – 22
percent – in the “Swatch the club” community, the authors should have provided more details
such as errors and distortions that might be caused by non-response bias.
Furthermore, the two selected communities differ in so many aspects such as product
categories, industries, geographical scopes, sizes and community development stage. It is not a
sound decision to conduct research on two vastly dissimilar samples, a fact that is also
acknowledged by the authors, which offer limited scope for generalization.
Measurement instrument
The measurement instrument is a questionnaire that consists of 16 items on a seven-point
Linkert scale, which are adopted from the multiple item scales by McAlexander et al. (2002).
However, the authors have “substituted items we believe relate closely to the investigated
construct” because the original scale is partially complete. As the scales were developed from
prior scales, it is important to run pretest with samples from the two brand communities to
determine the suitability of those scales. Pretests are particularly important when the scales are
taken out of their normal context (Hair et al., 2010), which is a case in point as the original scales
were used for automobile communities whereas this research is conducted on communities based
on watches and games. As the authors have not run any pretests, the adequacy and validity of
the measurement instruments are highly questionable.
Results
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4. Literature Review Sample Series No.4 Prepared by Michael Ling
The research uses a combination of Ward‟s method and K-means clustering procedure to
analyse the data sets which, upon application of agglomeration schedules, results in a four-
cluster and a six-cluster solution for the Settlers of Catan and for Swatch communities
respectively. Upon consideration of the various scores along the four customer-centric
dimensions, the clusters in the Settlers of Catan community are classified into „Enthusiasts‟,
„Behind the scenes‟, „Users‟ and „Not me‟. Similarly, the clusters in the Swatch community are
classified into „Enthusiasts‟, „Behind the scenes‟, „Users‟, „Not me‟, „Socializers‟ and „Average‟.
The authors conclude that there is evidence of heterogeneity among members in the two
communities but concede that there are difficulties to explain the clusters on the basis of the
customer relationships. It is important to validate and to ensure the practical significance of
clustering solutions given the subjective nature of cluster analysis (Hair et al., 2010). A common
approach is to cluster analyse separate samples and then compare the cluster solutions, where
discrepancies can be addressed. Another approach is to split the sample into two groups, cluster
analyse the two groups and compare the results. Unfortunately, the authors have not validated
their results by any one of these methods, which cast doubts on the validity and reliability of
their results.
References:
Hair, J. F., W. C. Black, B. J. Babin, R. E. Anderson. (2010) Multivariate Data Analysis – A Global Perspective,
7ed, Pearson Prentice Hall.
McAlexander, J.H., Schouten, J.W., and H.F. Koenig. (2002) Building brand community, Journal of Marketing, 66
(1), 38-54.
Neuman, W.L. (2006) Social Research Methods – Qualitative and quantitative Approaches, 6ed, Pearson.
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