Communal Consumption and the Brand
Thomas C. O’Guinn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and
Albert M. Muniz, Jr., DePaul University, Chicago
in
Inside Consumption: Frontiers of Research on Consumer Motives, Goals, and Desires David Glen Mick and S. Ratneshwar. (eds.) (Routledge, forthcoming), 2004.
Communal Consumption and the Brand
Thomas C. O’Guinn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and
Albert M. Muniz, Jr., DePaul University, Chicago
The vast majority of the marketing and consumer behavior literature is about one quasi-dyadic relationship: marketer and individual consumer. In this literature, why is typically explained in terms of attitudes, evaluation of attribute bundles, affect, judgment biases and decision heuristics…all at the individual level. While these factors are no doubt important, the truly social aspects of consumption have been largely overlooked and undervalued. To be sure, social psychologists attempt (more or less) to account for the influence of others on individual consumer’s thoughts and judgments. But this is hardly the same as studying social behavior as social behavior: consumer behavior formed and enacted within aggregations shaped by, sanctioned by, and grounded in the role of relationships, institutions and other social collectives. In the “field” (the one as defined by researchers in U.S. business schools) of consumer research, the social is most often constructed as a moderating variable to the cognitive processes of individuals, a weak modifier of the Über Namen, “psychology,” and little more. In our view, the truly social is exceptionally rare in this discourse. Of course, to those outside this generally insular American field, the social means much, much more.
Take community. This idea has been used in the pursuit of understanding human beings for over two hundred years. Community was important to Immanuel Kant in 1781, and still to Fredrich Nietzsche a century later (1886). It was important to Karl Marx in that same year (1867), and Durkheim in 1893, and was given its modern sociological nomenclature in 1887 by Ferdinand Tonnies: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (roughly Community and Society). From that point forward it is canonical sociology. Simmel in the early twentieth century (1904), Max Weber (1922), and Freud in 1928, were all convinced of its fundamental place in explaining human behavior. So central was the word “community,” that it stood in actual opposition to the word “society,” they were functional antonyms, truly antagonistic forces. According to these founding social theorists, community was being destroyed by the forces of society; society is, of course, modernity’s defining form. Community is thus arguably the founding word in social thought (Lasch 1991). Further, community has remained a key construct for two centuries, and continues to be a staple of political, religious, scholarly and popular discourse (Bauman 2001, Bellah et al. 1985; Boorstin 1973; Etzioni 1993; Fischer 1975; Lasch 1991; Maffesoli 1996; Wellman 1979). Most recently, it is the subject of Robert Putnam’s (2000) remarkable Bowling Alone, and is present in everyday utterance.
Critical to the present writing is that fact that as broadly as the notion of community applies, marketplace behavior has a particularly important place in community theory. The very idea of community is historically bound to its condition and fate in the wake of modernity, itself driven by market capitalism and then consumer culture. The branded society in which we now live, how we now behave as consumers, is the assumed cause (and result) of community’s demise. To make it simple: community is a consumer behavior term. The interplay of community and consumption is central to a fuller understanding of how we live and why we consume as we do.
Yet, it has taken the nascent field of consumer research well into its third decade to more than mention community, even in passing. To this point, the why of consumption almost never touched on this core and defining social construct, at least in the field as defined above. The reasons for this are, as always, essentially political in nature, and are tinged with the vagaries of academic history. It is in no small part due to the hegemony of the field’s psychological atomism that holds that while there is a social, it must be relatively inconsequential relative to cognitive process. It is the product of a field where meaning is essentially set aside along with institutional social relations, social production, politics, and history, or it is ridiculously reduced to summed and weighted attitudes. It is a field that celebrates a certain kind of narrowness, a narrowness grounded in the cult of the individual. So, quite understandably, the social gets short shrift. But now we are afforded a chance to address this peculiar (at least to the larger world of scholarship) absence in the discourse of the why of consumption.
Brands
To most scholars, it is absolutely axiomatic (Goody 1993, Schudson 1984) that there is no such thing as just a thing. All material objects carry with them meaning…even the ones grossly mislabeled as “utilitarian.” This point has been made too many times (cf. Goody 1993; Sahlins 1972; Smith 1937) by too many celebrated scholars to belabor it here. As Michael Schudson (1984) so famously pointed out, there has never been a society where things were just things. The entire human record consists of no place where materiality and meaning are strangers. Such a place, such a time, are fictions. So things always have social meaning. But, brands go even further, are particularly marked, and have a special relationship to modern market economies, those economies marked by marketing, advertising and consumption.
In the late nineteenth century, brands replaced many “unmarked” commodities. While it is true that there were some branded products prior to this period, it is during the last two decades of the nineteenth century that the ubiquitous branding we know today began. In 1875, relatively few consumer items were branded. Twenty five years later there were thousands more. The phenomenal growth first took place in package goods. Soap, previously, sold by weight from a generally unbranded cake becomes Ivory (1882) and Sapolio (circa 1875). Beer, previously drawn from an unnamed keg, becomes Budweiser (1891). All across the spectrum of goods and services, commodities become brands, as did the flood of new things designed for the modern marketplace of 1900.
In was a necessity of modern market capitalism to discover and promulgate brands. Consider the economics. Commodities (beer, soap) have pretty elastic demand functions. If there is no distinction between soaps, if all soaps are completely interchangeable, then price increases are bound to be met with declines in demand. In classic economic terms, the set of acceptable substitutes is large, so the demand is price elastic. But when soap became Ivory in 1882, all that changed. Procter and Gamble began to impart different, additional and particular meaning on the previously unmarked commodity. Due to the new marketplace meaning of Ivory brand soap, there were far fewer acceptable substitutes, at a given price, and thus value was added…as was profit for Procter and Gamble. Ivory’s demand function was, compared, to mere “soap,” inelastic. Brands made good economic sense, and modern market capitalism became reliant on branding.
It is no coincidence that this period is also known as the birth of the modern advertising industry (Fox 1984). Major advertising agencies such as J. Walter Thompson and N.W. Ayer were founded during this period. The growth is obvious in a ten fold increase (Fox 1984) in advertising spending between 1864 ($50 million) and 1900 ($500 million.) Brands were created and projected into national consciousness by men Roland Marchand (1985) called “apostles of modernity,” that is, ad men. Ivory would claim purity as its own during a period when purity was of vital concern to Americans. The average life expectancy in the US in 1900 was 49.2 years (Sullivan 1926). Infant mortality was twice what it would be just twenty—five years later (Sullivan 1926). A concerned public pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1904. Purity was a more than a word; it was, at that time, one of the few things the public believed might prevent them or the children from dying young. So, Ivory floats. Its purity was demonstrated by the fact it floated. Of course, no one really had to understand the physical mechanism relating purity to floating…it became a marketplace truism. Social context gave meaning to Ivory’s branding, its advertising claim, and the meaning of a bar of soap that floated. Soap was not merely a “utilitarian” product, and certainly Ivory was not. Ivory meant something. Ivory was pure, it was 99 44/100 pure. Ivory, in the collective late 19th century mind, was no longer a commodity…its set of acceptable substitutes shriveled. The same was true of countless other branded goods and services. During the last years of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century branding literally exploded. Commodities dropped by the hundreds. Advertising and branding pushed marketplace modernity along: they were its engines, they were its mode.
Over the next eight or so decades, the branding tide rose to cover just about everything. By the end of the twentieth century dirt was branded and water was branded. Few things were left out. Religions rushed to brand, so did universities, cities, and national parks. Brands came to be important in the lives of citizens. Citizens became consumers, consumers of brands. We became a branded society, and brands had meaning, social meaning, meaning that cannot be neatly isolated from its historical, political, cultural and social grounding.
The Modern Concern with Community’s Demise
The parallel story-line of this play was about what was supposedly happening to community. Remember, it was mass-marketed, branded society that was the prime suspect in the slaying of community. This meta-narrative is the leitmotif of modern social thought: commercial urban life destroyed “true” community. And of course, driving modernity was market capitalism. One does not have to look very far for the perfect icon of the capitalist marketplace: the brand. The rise of the brand, and branded society, is traditionally thought to be at the expense of community. How ironic is it to now be writing of their admixture: brand community? Yet, since the post-modern is marked by irony, then perhaps brand community is perfectly and precisely of its time. Or, maybe the two constructs (brand and community) have always shared more, and were less antithetical, than modernist social thought allowed. The latter is our belief.
Now, after two centuries or so, we arrive here, at this moment where three things are true: (1) brands are a ubiquitous aspect of daily life in market economies, (2) brands are often meaningful to contemporary citizens, and (3) community was not so easily done way with; the communal urge of humans and the benefits that accrue to collectives and institutions ensured community’s adaptive longevity. Community endures in all sorts of forms, in all sorts of places, including in the marketplace.
Finally, we assert a fourth thing to be true: meaningful marketplace communities exist today. We argue here that community, of a particular sort, is alive and well in the form of brand community. Brand communities possess the hallmarks of traditional communities, but have their own unique market logics and expressions. After making the case that brand communities possess the defining characteristics of traditional forms of community, we discuss particular forms of brand communities. We discuss brand community and market-place rumor, and the newly empowered communal consumer. We discuss the polit-brand (the particularly politicized brand of the political left), and a brand community with a particularly religious ethos. We discuss these communities in the context of the on-line communications revolution. We conclude by offering a basic model of the social construction of brands.
This paper casts the why question differently due to its alternative cast of social actors in the social construction of consumption practice: not a single heuristic is mentioned. Instead, we observe active and meaningful negotiation of the brand itself between consumer collectives and marketing institutions. We further break with traditional modernist thought by not focusing on authenticity. These are, in our pragmatic view, largely irrelevant at this point: that train has left the station. These contemporary social forms clearly exist, and do not appear to be going away anytime soon. So rather than documenting yet one more of late capitalism’s subversions of “the real,” we will instead focus on what consumers derive from these social forms, and what the communities themselves and other social collectives derive.
Evidence of Community Characteristics: Branded consumption has become so central to contemporary societies that social aggregations form around consumption practices and objects, and possess the traditional markers of community. Some of these are brand communities, communities that have at their center some form of branded consumption. As noted by Muniz and O’Guinn (2001), brand communities, just like other forms of community, posses three defining characteristics: consciousness of kind, evidence of rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral obligation to the community and its members.
consciousness of kind: First, and by far the most important attribute of community is consciousness of kind. To be a community, a group of people have to feel a collective similarity to one-another and the group, and a collective difference both individually and collectively from other groups. Consider this from an on-line Mazda Miata on-line community post:
Truth be told, I just “found” this group and I’m a happy little person now that I’ve found there are other people out there like me that love their Miatas!
This verbatim reveals language of someone being happy because they realized that there are others just like them…out there…who get it…who see what they see. The promise of community…not to be alone…to share adoration…no matter how odd or inappropriate others feel it to be, is revealed here. The language looks much like that of someone saying that they discovered others with the same sexual orientation, the same health problems, the same religion, the same love of an in-common object, in this case a brand and model of car. It is consciousness of kind. Bender (1978) describes it as Awe-ness.@ And the why is addressed simply: a consumer is made happy because of the traditional promises of community…the rewarding and embracing collective. To the collective derive the benefits of name, allegiance and social power.
Members of a brand community feel an important connection to the brand, and toward one another. This multi-node, rather than dyadic social constellation is a defining facet of brand community. Informants also note a critical demarcation between users of their brand and users of other brands. There was some important quality, not always easily verbalized, that set them apart from others, and makes them similar to one another. Such a demarcation usually included a reference to brand users being Adifferent@ or Aspecial@ compared to users of other brands.