Brand communities reveal the socially situated nature of brands as something more than a summation of attitudes or impoverished critical stereotypes. While the meaning of a brand is acknowledged as an important quality (Dobni and Zinkhan 1990, Fournier 1998, Gardner and Levy 1955; Levy 1959), it has been given surprisingly little research attention, and even less from a sociological perspective. We hold that brands are undeniably and fundamentally social entities, created as much by consumers as by marketers (Firat and Venkatesh 1995) in a complex and fascinating dance of social construction. This intersection of brand—a defining entity of consumer culture—and community—a core sociological notion—is an important one. Perhaps most significantly, this may be a place where consumer behavior can contribute something beyond our narrowly defined field and more fully engage the larger scholarly project.
At this moment in the early twenty‐first century, the notion of community occupies a particularly important space. The things that community has traditionally represented are sites of considerable contestation in the postmodern world. At this moment we seek to understand community’s existence, persistence, endurance, and constant reinvention in the postmodern consumption space where enormous changes in human communication reside. At this nexus we introduce the idea of brand community. We believe brand communities to be real, significant, and generally a good thing, a democratic thing, and evidence of the persistence of community in consumer culture.