New insights into online consumption communities and netnography

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.04.015Get rights and content

Abstract

This study provides new insights to online consumption communities by questioning the currently dominant view of communities being structured by subcultural capital and meanings pertinent to a specific field of consumption, such as one brand or consumption interest. This study argues for more sensitivity in recognizing increasing delocalization, which manifests itself in significant overlap between communities and consequently freer movement of participants between them. This study draws from a longitudinal and introspective netnographic research project in what was originally an electronic music community to discuss the consequences of this development. The study finds that delocalization manifests itself through situated individualism and delocalized performances within online consumption communities, and offers implications for future netnographic inquiry.

Introduction

The study of different types of consumption communities has become a staple topic within the field of consumer culture theory (Luedicke, 2006, McAlexander et al., 2002, Schau et al., 2009; for CCT, see Arnould & Thompson, 2005). More recently, however, research interest has concentrated on social consumption activities taking place in online consumption communities (Cova and Pace, 2006, Kozinets, 2002, Muñiz and Schau, 2005). But as the online realm is continuously evolving, some assumptions need to be revisited. The rise of network society was proclaimed long ago already (Castells, 1996), but it is only recently that the full effect of how global ideologies and digitally enabled information flows shape local consumption contexts have become visible (Appadurai, 1990, Bennett, 1999, Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006). Contemporary online environments are recognized as catalysts for the fragmentation and cluttering of the marketplace with meanings and signs, as outlined in postmodern frameworks of consumption (Brown, 1995, Deuze, 2006, Firat and Dholakia, 2006, Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). By consequence, online environments have become multiple and delocalized with people sharing various connections or maintaining digital presences in multiple communities across the globe (Kozinets, 2010). However, this type of multiplicity between online consumption communities lacks theorization, and especially methodological concerns need addressing.

The main purpose of this study is to illustrate some of the consequences of this technological and cultural shift in consumer research of online communities. The study illustrates how the increasing connectivity between online consumption communities makes defining a community's structure as being tied to one single consumption interest difficult — a problem noted in some recent works (Arsel and Thompson, 2011, Kozinets, 2007, Thomas et al., 2013). Based on findings from a longitudinal research project with a strong autoethnographic and introspective orientation conducted in a Finnish online consumption community, this study shows that members of such fragmented online consumption communities are increasingly engaging in communities from a more individualistic perspective and by connecting to a multitude of contexts — both offline and online. This study also underlines the difficulties in defining community structure through traditional means, such as subcultural capital (Thornton, 1996). Finally, this study illustrates how researching such complex contexts can greatly benefit from autoethnographic and introspective approaches.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

The study of different types of consumption communities has claimed centrality in research on consumer collectives, resulting in conceptual breakthroughs such as subculture of consumption, brand community and consumer tribe (Canniford, 2011, Cova et al., 2007, Schouten and McAlexander, 1995, McAlexander et al., 2002). While many of these prior studies have also dealt with the online element of consumption communities, more recent research projects have investigated consumption communities from

Method and research context

The online community Stealth Unit (SU, www.stealthunit.net) was the focus of this study's netnographic inquiry (Kozinets, 2010). SU originally came together in 2001 as a site for a small circle of Finnish enthusiasts of the electronic music genre drum n bass, which, as an eclectic bass-driven offshoot of the UK rave culture, emerged in the mid-1990s (McLeod, 2001). The community has since grown considerably, peaking around 2009 with more than 5000 registered members and contributors as well as

Findings

The findings concentrate on two specific themes: 1) how the community's members were now engaging with the community on an individual level and 2) what kind of performances or phenomena the community enables on a communal and inter-communal level. The community members' individual orientation towards the community is conceptualized as situated individualism. On the level of the entire community, the community is now increasingly enabling delocalized performances that are shared, negotiated and

Discussion

The primary contribution of this study is to illustrate the inherent difficulties in defining online consumption communities as singular consumption fields and in seeing that member hierarchy comes about straightforwardly by the mastery of the field. While one central topic can still have a strong orienting effect in many online communities (as such centrality is often maintained, for example, through active moderation and intervention), the findings in this study illustrate how understanding

Acknowledgment

We thank the editor and the anonymous reviews for their highly constructive comments and patience throughout the writing process of this manuscript. We thank John W. Schouten for his valuable commenting during the write-up of the final draft. We thank the research participants for agreeing to share their stories with us.

References (54)

  • Z. Arsel et al.

    Demythologizing consumption practices: How consumers protect their field-dependent identity investments from devaluing marketplace myths

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (2011)
  • J. Baudrillard

    The spirit of terrorism: And other essays

    (2003)
  • A. Bennett

    Subcultures or neo-tribes? Rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste

    Sociology

    (1999)
  • S. Brown

    Postmodern marketing research: No representation without taxation

    Journal of the Market Research Society

    (1995)
  • R. Canniford

    A typology of consumption communities

    Research in Consumer Behavior

    (2011)
  • M. Castells

    The network society

    (1996)
  • B. Cova et al.

    Brand community of convenience products: new forms of customer empowerment — The case “my Nutella The Community”

    European Journal of Marketing

    (2006)
  • B. Cova et al.

    Tribes, Inc.: the new world of tribalism

  • M. Deuze

    Participation, remediation, bricolage: Considering principal components of a digital culture

    The Information Society

    (2006)
  • J. Dibbell

    Radical opacity

    Technology Review

    (2010)
  • C. Ellis

    Sociological introspection and emotional experience

    Symbolic Interaction

    (1991)
  • A.F. Firat et al.

    Theoretical and philosophical implications of postmodern debates: Some challenges to modern marketing

    Marketing Theory

    (2006)
  • A.F. Firat et al.

    Liberatory postmodernism and the reenchantment of consumption

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1995)
  • K. Gelder

    The field of subcultural studies

  • M. Giesler et al.

    Reframing the embodied consumer as cyborg. A posthumanist epistemology of consumption

    Advances in Consumer Research

    (2005)
  • S.J. Gould

    The self-manipulation of my pervasive, perceived vital energy through product use: An introspective-praxis perspective

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1991)
  • E. Hargittai et al.

    The participation divide: Content creation and sharing in the digital age

    Information, Communication & Society

    (2008)
  • Cited by (61)

    • How institutional logics shape fairness in crowdsourcing: The case of Threadless

      2023, International Journal of Research in Marketing
      Citation Excerpt :

      The first author also recorded a total of 36 pages of field notes as analyses on these posts, including notes on interactions, company reactions, and changes in the community and to company policy. As the community interactions proliferated to other social media platforms, so did our inquiry (Weijo, Hietanen & Mattila, 2014). We included discussions from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram that related to Threadless.

    • #COVID-19: Forms and drivers of social media users’ engagement behavior toward a global crisis

      2021, Journal of Business Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      Compared to other qualitative research techniques, the unique value of netnography is that it excels at telling the story, understanding complex social phenomena, and assists the researcher in developing themes from the users' points of view (Kozinets, 2010). Multiple authors have advocated using netnography when studying online user-generated content in business research (Vo Thanh & Kirova, 2018; Weijo, Hietanen, & Mattila, 2014) and engagement research (Azer & Alexander, 2018; Brodie et al., 2013; Hollebeek & Chen, 2014). In line with Kozinets (2010) recommendations for the site selection and to ensure diversity of contexts and robustness of findings, Twitter and Facebook were selected.

    • The passing of the postmodern in pop? Epochal consumption and marketing from Madonna, through Gaga, to Taylor

      2020, Journal of Business Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      Publicity may usefully capture a looser post-postmodern communal agglomeration such as that of digital communities. Weijo, Hietanen and Mattila (2014: 2072) note that online consumers are “engaging in communities from a more individualistic perspective” as they highlight a more individual orientation to communal engagement. “There is a growing evidence that social media support a publicity-oriented consumer culture, oriented around appearance and visibility rather than identity and belonging, and where value co-creation is structured by private or collective affects, rather than deliberate and common values” (Arvidsson et al., 2016: 728).

    • Two-way acculturation in social media: The role of institutional efforts

      2019, Technological Forecasting and Social Change
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    1

    Present address: Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Tel.: + 358 50 312 0927.

    2

    Tel.: + 358 40 738 7221.

    View full text