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The aim of the chapter is to focus on the connections between three types of actors who build the new world of brands – consumers, marketers, and financier – by focusing on the co-creation of value between the brand community and the company owning the brand.

The chapter use three case vignettes to highlight the dual process at play when a community of consumers co-create brand value.

The chapter not only highlights a value-creating trajectory for companies but also shows how a reverse process can destroy value for the very same companies. It suggests that marketers’ desire to maximize the value co-created between the company and the community in order to answer the financial requirement of brand valuation could damage the value co-creation process. According to our case vignettes’ results, these marketers are exposing themselves to the risk that consumers/fans will rebel as a result of this branding maximization, leading in return to the creation of a competitor in the form of a community brand.

Future research will have to investigate how by cutting across organizational boundaries and functional areas, brand communities would reshape the marketing–finance interface.

The chapter stresses the need for companies to manage carefully the triadic relationship community/marketing/finance in order to avoid the development of a reverse brand value destruction process. In addition, the chapter contributes to research on the marketing–finance interface by highlighting the need to look beyond this level of interaction when it comes to branding.

Starting with the principle that consumers grouped into communities are increasingly responsible for making brands through their value-creating practices, the chapter highlights the problems raised by the company’s will to transform them into value for shareholders.

This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment.

By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value).

This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world.

It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers.

Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.

From a perspective of ‘critical performativity’, John Lewis is of special interest since it is celebrated as a successful organization and heralded as an alternative to more typical forms of capitalist enterprise.

Our analysis uses secondary empirical material (e.g. JLP documents in the public domain, histories of John Lewis and recent empirical research). Our assumption is that engagement and interrogation of existing empirical work can be at least as illuminating and challenging as undertaking new studies. In addition to generating fresh insights, stimulating reflection and fostering debate, our analysis is intended to contribute to an appreciation of how structures of ownership and governance are significant in enabling and constraining practices of organizing and managing.

The structures of ownership and governance at John Lewis, a major UK employee-owned retailer, have been commended by those who wish to recuperate capitalism and by those who seek to transform it.

JLP can be read as a ‘subversive intervention’ insofar as it denies absentee investors access to, and control of, its assets. Currently, however, even the critical performative potential of the Partnership model is impeded by its paternalist structures. Exclusion of Partners’ participation in the market for corporate control is reflected in, and compounded by, a weak form of ‘democratic’ governance, where managers are accountable to Partners but not controlled by them.

Our contention is that JLP’s ownership and governance structures offer a practical demonstration, albeit flawed, of how an alternative form of organization is sufficiently ‘efficient’ and durable to be able to ‘compete’ against joint-stock companies.

By examining the cooperative elements of the John Lewis structures of ownership and governance, we illuminate a number of issues faced in realizing the principles ascribed to employee-owned cooperatives – notably, with regard to ‘democratic member control’, ‘member economic participation’ and ‘autonomy and independence’.

In a period of moral and economic crisis all the alternative solutions to finance economic activities are interesting to study, specifically those embedded in solidarity practices. The nature of the ties (bonding ties, linking ties or bridging ties) and solidarities (institutional solidarity, formal or informal solidarity, intergenerational solidarity) must then be examined.

The exchanges between the people are governed by three different modes: the market, the redistribution and the reciprocity which acts to maintain the relation (Lavoué, Jézequel, & Janvier, 2010, p. 34). The exchanges are not only of economic order and also participate in the symbolic world. Our main question is: can the relations of exchange become emancipated from the reification? We illustrate this chapter with the case of the Kabylian traditional society and market (Benet, 1957–1975) where the practices of exchanges are not only of economic order (redistribution …) but also matter with the symbolic world (honour).

Even today, in Kabylia, the survival of an ancestral social organisation (tajmaat) which has anchored in tradition and rooted values (tirugza) and practices (tiwiza) sometimes allows the local populations to offer the missing public goods or the solidarity towards those who need help (elders, orphans).

In traditional Kabyle society, exchange practices are not only economic in nature (they contribute to mutual assistance, redistribution, etc.), but are also symbolic.

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly as it relates to the impact of the firm shareholder governance model on the shape of society.

The author contrasts an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective to explicate current conditions under which neither the state nor the market prevail in organizing economic activity (i.e. the co-operative form of governance and community-created brand value).

This paper offers mechanisms and recommendations regarding the formalized conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles to facilitate new expressions of the principles of co-ordination. Such behaviour will allow for the development of common resources the purpose being a re-appropriation of the world.

This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis which combines financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment. Dismissing the alternative of individuals simply forsaking engagement with society as it stands, it becomes necessary to revisit at this historical moment, the ideals on which modern societies are built, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology limited by capitalist notions of private property, motivating this inquiry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore brand transformation and the value slippage that can ensue.

This is a conceptual paper drawing upon a solid bibliographic base; its intended contribution is to create a linkage among constructs. It mobilizes a socio-economic framework which enables the multiple transformations of the brand to be monitored. Two case vignettes of Nutella brand are used to discuss this brand transformation framework.

The framework identifies four key brand transformation practices: brand appropriation by consumers forming a brand community, brand “surfeiting” through brand community actions, brand genericization throughout the society and brand regeneration in the market. The discussion highlights four categories of value slippage effects that enable us to ascertain whether the use value generated by the brand community slips – or does not – to another actor who captures it in the form of use or exchange value.

This paper is a conceptual paper.

The challenge for the firm is, therefore, to play an active role in these dynamics to gain ownership of new value that emerges beyond its confines and to offer its shareholders and/or external investors with new spaces within which to grow the value of their capital.

Value slippage concerns the way any actors involved in these processes, particularly brand community members, exploit brand transformation for their own benefit.

This paper aims to highlight a typology of small firms which, beyond the criteria of size or industrial field, makes it possible to distinguish the quality of firms according to their internal organisation and the type of market on which they act with the objective of reducing the capital gap and credit rationing.

Based on a global approach using qualitative and quantitative data.

Still at the experimental stage, this method of assessing the ability of small firms to access financing from their various external partners could, if widely used, offer a means of increasing the transparency of small businesses and thereby enhancing their positioning and their chances of survival.

The research is at an early stage and needs to be validated empirically.

While this paper describes a method of assessing an economic policy intended to benefit SMEs in France, its main purpose is to show how such a tool can help to target assistance and financing for small businesses more effectively.