The general strategy was to begin at the most local level, a neighborhood, where the odds of seeing brand community would be lowest but the contextualized behavior would be the most natural. In this way it was a conservative sampling approach. In order to have a reasonable understanding of the brand communities, it is necessary to observe their enactment in everyday life. With this purpose, the research began with the study of four families from one neighborhood (Fairlawn) in a small Midwestern town, Bloomingdale (pop. 115,000). Fairlawn was chosen largely for convenience. In it we hoped to see evidence of extant brand communities within the everyday context of life in a medium‐sized Midwestern town. Having discovered evidence of a few brand community members within Fairlawn, we then branched outward to individual members of those same brand communities who live outside the Fairlawn neighborhood, as well as to area collectives of brand community members such as users’ groups, and important local brand communal sites such as dealerships (see Fig. 1). In these enclaves and at these sites, community interaction is still predominantly (but not exclusively) face‐to‐face. Also, brand communities discovered in Fairlawn were investigated on the World Wide Web, where neither interaction nor community was face‐to‐face or geographically bound.