Researching and marketing to consumption collectives

Abstract

Consumer researchers have identified a handful of consumption collectives, such as consumption tribes, brand communities, and communities of practice. A consumption collective is a group of consumers who share consumption characteristics. Despite the use of participant screens in other research domains, published consumption collective research rarely reports on participant screens demonstrating their participants are actual members of the specific collective under investigation. Without participant screens researchers may mistakenly attribute conflicts over heterogeneous resources to intra-collective competition when the source may be inter-collective competition. This research demonstrates that consumer researchers can implement a short survey during field interviews as a participant screen. The article concludes by suggesting that marketing strategies and branding messages should be adjusted according to the individual consumer’s consumption collective membership status.