Brand Community and Symbolic Interactionism: A Literature Review

Abstract

This paper reviews and synthesizes existing literature on symbolic interactionism (SI) and on brand communities (BCs). On the one hand, we identified an interest on SI as a sociological perspective to address a wide range of topics affecting human behavior (e.g. Chen et al., 2020; Sumeraru et al., 2019; vom Lehn et al., 2021). On the other hand, advances on BC exist mostly in the fields of marketing and branding, although these communities operate according to social dynamics. The literature review identified that interaction is key for a BC to develop, as basic symbolic-interactionist tenets are reflected (explicitly nor not) in the BC literature. Thus, our review: (a) identifies several SI premises that help explaining BCs as social contexts of symbolic interaction, (b) identifies SI as a suitable approach to study the collective and symbolic dimension of consumption, and (c) offers an analysis of relationships between SI and BC, thus developing sociological research applied to marketing and brand management, by combining the three interactionist traditions to study BC. This review also suggests new venues of research, such as the study of self-enhancement and branding through the lens of SI.