The paper added something that was clearly missing from the academic work on brands: an explicit acknowledgement of the social nature of brands. Prior to that, the field of consumer research had been bound up in what was a somewhat useful, but very limited idea of brands as summations of attitudes. This was an impoverished view. Not necessarily wrong, but certainly incomplete.

“This paper suggests that community endures and emerges in different places, with different idioms and forms.”

Brands are about meaning, and meaning derives from society and a co-creation process among its agents and institutions: brands, marketers, and consumers. This paper gets cited by more primary fields because even though fields like anthropology had always known about material culture and the importance of the meaning of goods, they had their blind spots when it was both contemporary (read: didn't have to be dug up) and commercial (read: profane). Otherwise, it's a well-written, somewhat revolutionary, and well thought-out paper. Luck wise, it came around at precisely the right time.

It certainly describes a new way of thinking about brands. Methodologically, it is important for its reliance on multi-methods: observation, participant observation, structure, and unstructured interview, and captured consumer-generated net data.

It demonstrated that human beings living in consumer cultures have begun to meaningfully aggregate around brands in a manner similar to those occurring in traditional face-to-face communities. This includes: a shared sense of commonality around a brand, a soft sense of responsibility to help others with their brand (e.g. common problems, repair/support issues), and rituals and brand narratives (e.g., how the Saab saved my life).

It demonstrated that brands were, in some ways, replacing or at least acting in a like manner, and serving some of the same functions as more traditional social institutions. Further, it points to the undeniable centrality and meaning brands have in our everyday lives.

Al Muniz was a student of Tom O’Guinn (Tom chaired Al’s dissertation committee). The paper was based on Al’s dissertation (Al is first author, and did the vast majority of the field work). We both felt like the existing brand literature was pretty bad. There were exceptions, but in general it was pretty bleak. The field was dominated by a paradigm that was particularly ill-suited to meaningfully discuss people and their brands.

The social aspects of consumption, particularly with regard to the consumption of brands, were almost completely unexplored. This thinking converged with experiences we both had with aggregations of brand loyalists (in particular, Saab and Apple). What we saw among users of those brands reminded us of what we saw in cohesive neighborhoods: a sense of community. We began to think that community might be a useful way to think about the relationships between users of certain brands. As we thought about it more, and collected more data, and read more of the classical sociological literature on community, we became convinced that we were on to something.

Sure, there were lots of stops and starts. We took a good three years to refine our thinking and collect the data for our first paper. We learned from the field. We encountered enormous resistance from those whose work derived from the prevailing models for explaining brands: they were generally unsupportive and dismissive (now they our citing our work).

The one group we never had difficulty convincing were practitioners: people in business were way ahead of academics on acknowledging the existence of brand community. They wanted to know what to do with them, how to leverage them. They didn’t always see them as a good thing, as they could be resistant to the actions of the marketer—and quite vocal about it.

The research has spawned several other groups of scholars to follow suit. Al (along with Hope Schau at the University of Arizona) has done some fascinating work with brand community and brand co-creation. Consumers, particularly those ensconced in cohesive brands communities, can be quite proficient in their production of brand related content. They are capable of brand innovation, support and promotion, often challenging the marketer in terms of success and effectiveness.

Tom is interested in that as well, but his next foray into this area will be in what he terms "polit-brands," or particularly politicized brands and their communities. There are many obvious examples (such as Wal-Mart or American Apparel). Tom believes that the line between branding and politics is dissolving very quickly.

Our work demonstrates that humans, as social beings, find and create community where they will. Sometimes, they will find it around a branded good. A lot of cultural criticism has lamented the loss of community associated with modernity. This paper suggests that community endures and emerges in different places, with different idioms and forms.