Brand communities

Literature Review Sample Series No.4 Prepared by Michael Ling

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LITERATURE REVIEW SAMPLE SERIES

NO. 4

“Ouwersloot, H., & Odekerken-Schroder, G. (2008). Who‟s who in brand communities – and

why? European Journal of Marketing, 42(5/6), 571-585”

Prepared by Michael Ling

Email: [email protected]

Note: Michael Ling is the sole author of this document. You’re welcomed to use its contents but,

as a courtesy, please quote the source of this paper http//www.michaelling.net/

mailto:[email protected]


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Research Problem & Objective

Brand communities are commonly perceived to exhibit a fair degree of homogeneity

among its members. The authors argue that current research fails to investigate the

heterogeneous elements within a community such as the various motivations that each member

has when he or she joins up. By naming and investigating four motivations that members might

have, the authors set out to explore the relative importance that members attach to their various

relationships (McAlexander et al., 2002) within a community. The possible segments in a

community are then identified by cluster analysis based on the relative strengths of these

relationship constructs. The four motivations and their corresponding community relationships

are as below.

1. “Quality assurance” to “Customer-to-company relationship”.

2. “High involvement in products” to “Customer-to-product relationship”.

3. “Joint consumption” to “Customer-to-customer relationship”.

4. “Symbolic function of brand” to “Customer-to-brand relationship”.

Sampling

The authors have selected two communities in their research - one being the community

of players of the board game Settlers of Catan, the other the Belgian and Dutch members of the

“Swatch the club”.

The authors have not adopted any probability sampling and, instead, used haphazard

sampling in collecting data for their research, which is likely to produce “ineffective, highly

unrepresentative samples” (Neuman, 2006). For example, regarding the Settlers of Catan

community, the authors state that they “visited these four tournaments and asked participants to

complete the self-administered questionnaires”. As there are twelve Dutch tournaments, the

authors have merely covered one-third of their targets.


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As the authors have not provided size estimates of the two brand communities, there is no

basis upon which to justify the adequacy and representativeness of the two samples. The authors

have not used any sampling plans for the two communities. The collected samples (and response

rates) are 104 respondents (81 percent) and 125 respondents (22 percent) from the Settlers of

Catan and “Swatch the club” respectively. Regarding such significant low response rate – 22

percent – in the “Swatch the club” community, the authors should have provided more details

such as errors and distortions that might be caused by non-response bias.

Furthermore, the two selected communities differ in so many aspects such as product

categories, industries, geographical scopes, sizes and community development stage. It is not a

sound decision to conduct research on two vastly dissimilar samples, a fact that is also

acknowledged by the authors, which offer limited scope for generalization.

Measurement instrument

The measurement instrument is a questionnaire that consists of 16 items on a seven-point

Linkert scale, which are adopted from the multiple item scales by McAlexander et al. (2002).

However, the authors have “substituted items we believe relate closely to the investigated

construct” because the original scale is partially complete. As the scales were developed from

prior scales, it is important to run pretest with samples from the two brand communities to

determine the suitability of those scales. Pretests are particularly important when the scales are

taken out of their normal context (Hair et al., 2010), which is a case in point as the original scales

were used for automobile communities whereas this research is conducted on communities based

on watches and games. As the authors have not run any pretests, the adequacy and validity of

the measurement instruments are highly questionable.

Results


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The research uses a combination of Ward‟s method and K-means clustering procedure to

analyse the data sets which, upon application of agglomeration schedules, results in a four-

cluster and a six-cluster solution for the Settlers of Catan and for Swatch communities

respectively. Upon consideration of the various scores along the four customer-centric

dimensions, the clusters in the Settlers of Catan community are classified into „Enthusiasts‟,

„Behind the scenes‟, „Users‟ and „Not me‟. Similarly, the clusters in the Swatch community are

classified into „Enthusiasts‟, „Behind the scenes‟, „Users‟, „Not me‟, „Socializers‟ and „Average‟.

The authors conclude that there is evidence of heterogeneity among members in the two

communities but concede that there are difficulties to explain the clusters on the basis of the

customer relationships. It is important to validate and to ensure the practical significance of

clustering solutions given the subjective nature of cluster analysis (Hair et al., 2010). A common

approach is to cluster analyse separate samples and then compare the cluster solutions, where

discrepancies can be addressed. Another approach is to split the sample into two groups, cluster

analyse the two groups and compare the results. Unfortunately, the authors have not validated

their results by any one of these methods, which cast doubts on the validity and reliability of

their results.

References:

Hair, J. F., W. C. Black, B. J. Babin, R. E. Anderson. (2010) Multivariate Data Analysis – A Global Perspective,

7ed, Pearson Prentice Hall.

McAlexander, J.H., Schouten, J.W., and H.F. Koenig. (2002) Building brand community, Journal of Marketing, 66

(1), 38-54.

Neuman, W.L. (2006) Social Research Methods – Qualitative and quantitative Approaches, 6ed, Pearson.

Business

Brand communities