Search results

Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.

The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).

We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.

The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.

Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.

Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.

Purpose: This study explores how the interplay between a passionate consumer and his embeddedness in the lively network of a consumer tribe represents a fertile environment for the emergence of an entrepreneurial venture that is able to combine micro- and macro-level concerns bridging tribe and marketplace needs.

Design/methodology/approach: The research, set within the context of an exemplar consumer’s entrepreneurial project, was conducted following a netnographic methodological approach.

Findings: By fluidly moving from within to outside the tribe in the wider marketplace, the entrepreneur crafts his own new space in the market through a cultural mediation work that effectively combines the affective, immaterial labor characterizing the social glue of the tribe collective ethos with entrepreneurial spirit and sharp marketing and consumer insight abilities. The entrepreneur acts as a resource integrator of traditional firm-driven and emerging consumer-driven marketplace without opposing existing market structures, but rather valorizing them through his intermediation work.

Research limitations: This is a single-case study that, although exemplar, needs to be expanded and consolidated with further empirical evidence.

Originality/value: The study contributes to extant literature on consumer-driven market emergence and new market system dynamics by uncovering the role of consumer entrepreneur as a reconfigurator of the existing market resources.

Purpose – This conceptual chapter clarifies concepts of marketplace community.

Methodology/Approach – Through a review of selected CCT studies, the chapter explores and reviews theories of subcultures of consumption, brand communities and consumer tribes.

Findings – Subcultures of consumption, brand communities and consumer tribes exhibit divergent qualities that are summarised in a typology of communities.

Research implications – The perspectives offered by tribal studies present powerful tools that compliment subcultural and brand community approaches to understanding the construction of marketplace cultures.

Practical implications – Theory that improves the understanding of different features of marketplace communities can help marketing practitioners to determine more appropriate communal marketing strategies.

Originality/Value of paper – This chapter recommends a consistent and commonly shared set of descriptive and theoretical terms for different kinds of marketplace community.

Cafés are becoming a key aspect in the renaissance of urban living. They are often the key element in the gentrification of urban neighbourhoods, and their role as the ‘third place’ is becoming fundamental to many people’s lives. They are where people go to socialize, sip coffee and watch the world go by. Several studies have considered this phenomenon, often linking the renaissance of café culture to their former role, in their perceived ‘heyday’, as locations of development of political and philosophical ideas. In this chapter, we explore the growth of the small, independent cafés which are becoming the homes of micro-communities and where a range of social interchange take place, as well as the consumption of food and beverage.

From our research, adopting the role of flaneurs to observe and experience the atmosphere of a number of independent cafés, we identify and classify some of these micro-communities by identifying the bonds that hold them together. The essential feature underlying the success of these independent cafés is much more than the food and beverage, it is also the environment, a place where customers feel comfortable socializing in an active or, in many cases, passive, way – for example, drinking coffee and reading the paper in a comfortable environment.

We also observe that many independent cafés have a loyal following which compose their regular customers. We have referred to these micro-communities as ‘tribes’. From our observations, it appears that they are growing and that for many in society they are becoming an important part of daily life.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.