Brand Meaning Negotiation and the Role of the Online Community: A Mini Case Study

This paper explores the role of the brand community in relation to brand meaning creation. We use an online ethnographic approach to better understand how brand meaning is negotiated, and sometimes contested, in the Mini car owners' community. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, we show how brand meaning creation is an ongoing, dynamic process of interaction between the marketing environment, the individual consumer's environment and the social environment. Overall the paper demonstrates how the online environment affords marketers a unique opportunity to monitor these social interaction processes as they are actually occurring between members of a brand community.