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The Dynamics of Brand Legitimacy: An Interpretive Study in the Gay Men’s Community
STEVEN M. KATES*
*Steven M. Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing at SimonFraserUniversity, FBA, Burnaby, Canada, V5A 1S6. His email . He would like to thank Russell Belk, Michael Beverland, Michael Ewing, Chris Dubelaar, Eileen Fischer, Robert Kozinets, and Douglas Holt for providing useful comments on earlier versions of this article. Mary-Ann Twist is especially thanked for her patience and understanding over the past few years. Finally, the author thanks four anonymous reviewers, the Associate Editor, and the past and current Editors of JCR for their endeavors.
Certain brands attain legitimacy – that is, social fitness or the right to occupy cultural space – through various existing frames and dynamic framing processes described in this article. Drawing on qualitative data collected from gay consumers, this article explores the ways brands are co-created in a non-brand focused community. Collective action frames, the shared ways of interpreting meanings within social interaction, provide the connection between a community and its legitimate brands. Informants routinely inscribe some brands with the frames of the gay community, and – when applying brand litmus tests, bridging, and inserting brands into the community’s collective memory – assess whether other brands share a social fit with the shared meanings of the gay community studied. Implications for understanding cultural authenticity and brand legitimacy are discussed.
Certain brands demonstrate legitimacy – a social fit with society’s or a community’s shared norms (see Suchman 1995). In contrast to the consumers studied in past works, many consumers are not self-conscious members of brand communities, subcultures of consumption, or cultures of consumption (e.g., Kozinets 2001, 2002; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). The subculture of consumption, brand community, and culture of consumption phenomena all represent cultural analyses that focus our attention solely on one type of collective brand consumption – the highly loyal, affective, and committed type in which the brand is, by very definition, the central consumption object. In contrast, this article focuses on brand co-creation in a context where brands are not the central focus; thus, it is necessary to unpack the meanings and sociocultural processes that continually problematize and ensure a brand’s legitimacy to its various consumer groupings. Exploring the ethnographic context of a North American gay community illustrates how consumers co-create brand meanings along with marketer efforts, and ways brand behaviors meet community standards (see DiMaggio and Powell 1983).
The central premise of this article is that legitimate sociocultural meanings are relevant during brands’ shared histories with various communities. In other words, sets of local (or more broadly shared), stable, strong and enduring agreements coalesce around certain brands (Schouten and McAlexander 1995; see also Berger and Luckmann 1966, pp. 51-55). But currently, consumer research has not fully examined legitimacy in connection with brands, or fully developed the concept’s potential to shed light on consumption (see Arnold, Kozinets, and Handelman 2001; Handelman and Arnold 1999). The consumer research on consumption communities has not addressed the important question of how brands actually develop legitimate cultural fit within these communities. Given the anti-brand, anti-globalization backlash (Holt 2002; Klein 1999), it is important that consumer research develop the legitimacy concept in relation to brands. Further, legitimacy as a central guiding concept has utility beyond the brand realm. Legitimacy – and institutional theory from where it was developed – has already been employed to understand consumers’ responses to retailer promotions (Arnold, Kozinets, and Handelman 2001; Handelman, and Arnold 1999). Its further development and application to consumer research may prompt future investigations and critiques of marketer ethics, consumers’ attitudes toward advertising, brand loyalties, and explanations of how and why groups of consumers reject or resist consumer culture (e.g., Kozinets 2002).
Thus, past research focusing strictly on consumption collectivities leaves some important research questions to be explored. How do brands attain legitimacy within a community, resulting in the creation, perpetuation, and alteration of brands’ social fit with these meanings? What cultural positions do brands occupy within a community focused on ideology or political action, where legitimacy is, arguably, a critical concern? The answers may transfer beyond the gay community to others, illuminating how brands achieve cultural influence. Arguably, legitimacy is a concept whose relevance has arrived. In the next section I selectively review the literatures on institutional theory and brands. After that, I present the methods, the ethnographic findings, and then propose implications.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: BRANDS AND LEGITIMACY
Currently, brands’ cultural influence and social responsibilities have been put into serious moral question (e.g., Holt 2002; Klein 1999). Nonetheless, recent research has demonstrated that consumers have important co-creative roles in brand construction. Consumers construct meanings around brands other than what sponsors may have intended (Kozinets 2001; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). Social groupings of consumers may take some degree of control over (i.e., co-create) a brand’s sociocultural meanings (e.g., Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). Thus, a brand’s legitimacy – the “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity [a brand, in the present context] are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions” (Suchman 1995, p. 574) – may be negotiated among consumers, affecting its cultural meanings. Yet, the question of how, whether, and when consumers co-create the brand and exercise some agency (or control) in non-brand-focused contexts is still open for further research. The notion of legitimacy helps illuminate the social processes in both personal and social contexts and explain the conditions of brand co-creation.
Institutional theory views companies and their brands as embedded in both the economic and institutional environments. The institutional environment refers to the cultural meanings, ideals, and accepted social norms associated with a given society or community. These norms usually serve as implicit and flexible guidelines (as opposed to explicit regulations) to which companies must adhere in order to maintain a moral fit with key publics such as consumers, professions, public opinion, and regulators. When a company achieves this sociocultural alignment, it is considered to be legitimate or institutionalized (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Suchman 1995). When firms achieve long-term fits with their institutional environments, and taken-for-granted meanings and habitual patterns of behavior are repeated by consumers, performed with minimal reflective thought (see Berger and Luckmann 1966; Suchman 1995), cognitive legitimacy is said to result. Further, moral legitimacy – that is, the way consumers actively question whether brands truly benefit the community – helps us understand the ways brands initially achieve their cultural meanings in non-brand-focused communities. Moral legitimacy also refers to whether companies pursue behaviorally consistent and prosocial actions, and is sometimes critically assessed by consumers (Handelman and Arnold 1999; Suchman 1995, p. 579). Both concepts are important in the study of the ways brands achieve fit with communities.
Previous work on consumption communities has focused largely on cognitive legitimacy; in these studies, the central brand requires little explicit or reflective legitimization. Consumers in brand communities, subcultures of consumption, and cultures of consumption are, by their very choices, focused on brands or consumption. Consumers join these communities only if they are interested in the focal brand (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). The brand’s right to occupy cultural space is not really challenged. The present context is very different. For certain non-brand-focused communities, the participation of brands in cultural life is more problematic. Particularly, the politically organized gay community I studied has exhibited an historical distrust of corporations and their brands, similar to many other North American gay enclaves (Baker, Strub and Henning 1995), raising questions of how brand co-creation is accomplished through dynamic framing processes. Indeed, the political roots of gay activism are unapologetically left-wing and hostile to capitalist interests. Thus, understanding the ways that gay consumers, in light of this history, co-create legitimate brands requires some explanation; institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977) provides the theoretical rationale to understand brand-related legitimacy. Also germane to the analysis of brand legitimacy is the premise that social subgroups generate and inscribe local collective action frames (i.e., frames) that organize members’ experiences and guide consumption behaviors (see Benford and Snow 2000). Frames are the flexible background cultural meanings consumers use to make sense of brands’ market behaviors. Frames also reflect and construct a shared social identity among consumers (Benford and Snow 2001; Gamson 1992) and shared means of interpreting events and circumstances (Gamson 1992).
Overall, as the interpretive analysis will demonstrate, frames legitimize some brands, in the eyes of informants. The theoretical framework below illustrates that during brand consumption, consumers routinely inscribe frames on a brand (i.e., reinforcing cognitive legitimacy). Yet, in other instances of brand consumption, there are potentially transformational or developmental processes that may occur – (re)assessments of moral legitimacy. Thus, frames shape brand consumption which, reciprocally, influences the continued evolution of the brand, and eventual change of the frames themselves. These processes lead to collective change in consumption practices. This notion corresponds with current definitions of legitimacy that emphasize its fluid nature (Suchman 1995). Next, I present the methods of the study.
THE PRESENT STUDY: METHODS EMPLOYED
I conducted an eighteen-month ethnographic study of an urban gay community located in a large North American city, focusing on a social group for older, professional gay men, and a gay and lesbian youth group. I made further contacts and over the course of six months, I interviewed forty-four gay men between the ages of sixteen and fifty-three (McCracken 1988). Six men were interviewed twice over the space of six months, in order to deepen understandings and facilitate temporal comparisons. Brands were discussed during interviews. There were only two criteria for inclusion in the study: first, potential male participants were willing to self-identify as gay. Second, I ascertained that they spent some of their leisure time participating in activities connected to the gay community.
In the gay men’s social group, I participated in meetings that featured keynote speakers, parties at members’ houses, and social nights or brunches at various restaurants. At the youth group, I observed games and speakers and sat in on meetings and discussions. I obtained express permission from the youth group leaders to interview gay youth under the age of eighteen, and interviewed these members at the community center in public. All the members of the group knew who I was and my purpose there. For eighteen months, I immersed myself almost completely in the activities occurring in the gay community’s locale, a requirement to produce trustworthy and insightful ethnographic interpretation (Stewart 1998). My participation in the gay and lesbian community became much more frequent and intense during the duration of the study. I attended bars, the local gay theatre, parties, and other events. I read gay newspapers and magazines, and I participated in the large Lesbian and Gay Pride Day held every year at the end of June, attending to both perspectives of action and perspectives in action (Wallendorf and Belk 1989). I revisited the area and the research issues for four summers following, performing participant observation, more casual follow-up interviews with informants, and recording casual in situ conversations.
Once the data had been collected, I transcribed them and read through interviews several times. I coded interviews using open coding and then attempted to synthesize and relate data to conceptual topics of interest such as interpretation of brands, various forms of marketing communications, and other major categories that emerged from data interpretation and literature review (Spiggle 1994; Strauss and Corbin 1998). I shared my interpretations with thirty-five informants whom I was able to contact, in order to obtain a sense of being faithful to their accounts. This article reports those findings that relate to the interpretation of local, regional, national, and global brands.
FINDINGS: LEGITIMATE BRANDS IN THE GAY MEN’S COMMUNITY
Cultivating socially acceptable meanings is the essence of brand legitimacy. Legitimate meanings are the products of social negotiation among members of the gay community. Co-creation of a brand’s cultural meanings depends on inscribing taken-for-granted, legitimate frames on it, reinforcing patterns of cognitive legitimacy. Further, legitimate brand co-creation is shaped by relevant aspects of brands’ accumulated past histories and current social events, sometimes leading to critical (re)assessments of moral legitimacy. Thus, there is a continuing exchange of shared meanings over time between these brands and the gay men’s community. Below, I describe the processes involved with (1) reinforcing cognitive legitimacy and (2) assessing moral legitimacy.
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Reinforcing Cognitive Legitimacy: Inscribing Frames During Brand Usage
Recall that cognitive legitimacy refers to taken-for-granted brand meanings and informants’ habitual patterns of behavior. Informants inscribe frames on brands during consumption. Interestingly, even in a community where members are not brought together by brands, some – Levi’s, The Body Shop, and Absolut Vodka – assume widely shared taken-for-granted meanings (i.e., cognitive legitimacy). During my ethnographic study of the gay men’s community, I identified three frames that routinely enjoin brands and consumers: (1) insider interpretations, (2) rewarding legitimate brands, and (3) punishing illegitimate brands, the gay community’s expanded interpretive repertoire.
Insider Interpretations. Informants consciously acknowledge themselves as a group of stigmatized consumers targeted by marketers. Brendan (WM 28) claims that a Levi’s loose jeans billboard ad close to the downtown gay area targets gay men – however covertly – because the man depicted in the ads is shirtless, toned, and attractive:
I firmly believe that they’re [Levi’s] going after a gay audience even though they would justify it saying that they’re going after women…you’ll see these images of built, buffed men…everywhere…’Cause they [the sponsors] kill two birds with one stone.
Brendan acknowledges that there are at least two plausible meanings of the brand’s behavior, attempting to construct privileged gay meanings or insider interpretation of the brand. In doing so, he explicitly challenges the dominant gender ideology in advertising by claiming that Levi’s genuine intention was to target gay men and perhaps ironically to deceive heterosexual consumers into believing that they were the only target market. In this oppositional interpretation, Brendan positions himself as a privileged consumer who penetrates red herrings and discerns the brand’s hidden agenda.
Generally, informants attended to the double coding of brands and ads, elaborating on the inclusive and gay friendly meanings that acknowledged them as gay consumers. Insider interpretation is a key frame that legitimizes a brand and assists in the co-creation of its legitimate meanings, staking a moral claim on the brand, by inscribing it with historical shared, grass-roots meanings. It is as if informants said: “But Levi’s is really our brand!” and connecting the brand to the community. Legitimizing the brand this way asserts shared identity and privilege of membership in the community for both the consumer and the brand.
One prominent kind of widespread insider interpretation is called camp pleasures.Camp legitimizes brands by rummaging through the meanings, products, and icons of mainstream culture (such as Absolut), and rearticulating them into gay contexts for criticism and mockery of the social status quo, or for gentle fun, celebrating exaggeration, excess, artifice, and irony (Kates 2002). Camp consumption pleasures involve a playful but gentle mocking of brands:
Matt, John, and I attended Res-Erection, a benefit night for people living with AIDS. The preferred drink was Absolut Vodka (the only brand of vodka served), and since it’s summer, the recommended drink was vodka and lemonade. Ms. Viva Vulva and Miss Connie Lingis, two very tall drag queens dressed in gold lame and yellow chiffon, sidled up to us. Connie asked, “Are you hot boys enjoying your Absolut-ly HARD lemonades, boys?” (field notes)
The camp frame inscribes brands with humorous and often bawdy double entendres. It is a means of bringing a brand into the cultural web of legitimate, grassroots, sexually charged, and gender inverted meanings commonly thought to constitute gay subculture (Kates 2002). Absolut Vodka was the ostensible butt of Ms. Lingis’ earthy sense of humor. However, the joke was not at the brand’s expense because Absolut was the sort of old friend that could stand a good-natured ribbing (see Fournier’s [1998] description of best friend brands). The reason for this is that Absolut shares a twenty-year history with the gay community. It was one of the first major brands to advertise in gay publications in the early 1980s (Baker et al. 1995). As a relatively older part of gay history, Absolut is routinely legitimized in practices, such as outlined above, or simply by asking for Absolut at a bar. Legitimacy is a reciprocal concept. While gay men confer legitimacy on Absolut, Absolut confers social legitimacy on gay men by sticking with the community through thick and thin. Powerful global brands, such as Absolute or Levi’s (below), were thought to bestow legitimacy and respectability on the gay community, moving it from its marginalized and social position to a more central one.