Limitations
The research reported in this article has several limitations that should be acknowledged. First, ethnographic research does not afford the same kind of generalizability that probability sampling does. Our neighborhood data overrepresented relatively affluent white families. Although there were women among our informants, the particular choice of automobiles and computers may have revealed a certain flavor of brand community and obscured others. These and other limitations undoubtedly colored our data and made themselves felt in the particular way brand community was socially enacted and expressed. How brand communities vary across social strata is a rich area for future work.
It must be acknowledged that two of the three brands studied had small market shares, while Jeep did not. Still, while it may be that brand community is most easily observed in threatened brands, we do not believe it is anywhere near that limited a social dynamic. Mark Pendegrast, in his history of Coca‐Cola, says: “The most powerful Coca‐Cola appeal has not, ultimately been sexual or physiological, but communal: if you drink Coke, the ads suggest, you will belong to a warm, loving, accepting family, singing in perfect harmony. If we can’t quite succeed in finding that stress‐free society today, never mind—we’ll find it tomorrow. We’ll build a better world for you and me, and everyone. It’s a beautifully seductive message, because it’s what we all want” (1993, p. 401).
We concur. While we believe more expansive future investigations will demonstrate this, we cannot make that case empirically at this point and must situate our findings in their particularities. We suspect that in the case of more popular (i.e., higher market share) brands such as Coca‐Cola, communal feeling may be considerably more subtle, less formally organized, but nonetheless powerful. Very subtle, but very socially embedded practices and feelings can be the most powerful of all. We believe that there are many, many brands around which community can and does coalesce.