Our understanding of marketplace communities begins
with what Boorstin (1974, p. 89) describes as consumption
communities, which he characterizes as “invisible new communities
… created and preserved by how and what men
consumed.” He observes that in the emerging consumer culture
that followed the industrial revolution, the sense of
community in the United States shifted away from the tight
interpersonal bonds of geographically bounded collectives
and into the direction of common but tenuous bonds of
brand use and affiliation: