Brand communities and anti-brand communities: similarities, differences and implications for managers

Brands are increasingly perceived as social entities that affect the ways in
which consumers relate to each other, and there is a growing interest in
consumer groups that support or oppose a given brand, referred to in marketing
literature as brand or anti-brand communities. Although the concept of
communities has been examined in the sociology literature for some time, there
is very little integration of the sociology and the marketing literature when
brand and anti-brand communities are examined. Furthermore, brand and antibrand
communities have largely been approached as different phenomena in
the marketing literature. This paper is trying to re-define brand communities
and to identify antecedents, internal functioning and consequences of these
communities. Using knowledge from the sociology and marketing literature, it
argues that brand and anti-brand communities are intrinsically more similar
than different. Therefore, they can both be described with the term brand-related
communities and they should be approached by researchers and
practitioners as similar rather than different phenomena.