Consumer Tribes

Marketing and consumer research has traditionally conceptualized consumers as individuals- who exercise choice in the marketplace as individuals not as a class or a group. However an important new perspective is now emerging that rejects the individualistic view and focuses on the reality that human life is essentially social, and that who we are is an inherently social phenomenon. It is the tribus, the many little groups we belong to, that are fundamental to our experience of life. Tribal Marketing shows that it is not individual consumption of products that defines our lives but rather that this activity actually facilitates meaningful social relationships. The social ’links’ (social relationships) are more important than the things (brands etc.)

The aim of this book is therefore to offer a systematic overview of the area that has been defined as ＂cultures of consumption＂- consumption microcultures, brand cultures, brand tribes, and brand communities. It is though these that students of marketing and marketing practitioners can begin to genuinely understand the real drivers of consumer behaviour. It will be essential to everyone who needs to understand the new paradigm in consumer research, brand management and communications management.

Bernard Cova is Professor of Marketing at Euromed Marseilles, School of Management, France and Visiting Professor at Università Bocconi, Milan, Italy. Ever since his first papers in the early 1990s, he has taken part in post-modern trends in consumer research and marketing, while emphasizing a Latin approach (e.g. Tribal marketing). He has published on this topic in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Marketing Theory and the Journal of Business Research. He is also known as a researcher in B2B marketing, especially in the field of project marketing.
A member of many tribes, Robert V. Kozinets is an Associate Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. His tribal affiliations include anthropology, film, Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Files fan, coffee connoisseur, Burning Man phreak, online and offline videogame, consumer activist, technophile, blog and venomous virtual community member - and he has managed to quench his own interest in all of them by turning them into stultifyingly ordinary research. Some of this tribally tinged twaddle can be found hidden in the rearmost pages of the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Consumption, Markets, & Culture and the Journal of Retailing. He developed and continues to seek brave souls to join him in developing the highly flammable techniques of netnography and videography, to tipping sacred cows in fields, and to saving our planet before it is too late.
Avi Shankar is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Consumer Research, in the School of Management at the University of Bath, England. He has eclectic research interests that can be broadly subsumed within three categories: critical analyses of contemporary consumer culture; consumer identity projects; and tribal consumption. Whilst the holy grail of the Journal of Consumer Research has thus far eluded him, he lives in hope. Meanwhile his ramblings can be found in, amongst others, the European Journal of Marketing, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Marketing Theory and the Journal of Marketing Management. When not writing these articles that no one seems to read, he is fully occupied with keeping his own tribe in order and has a keen interest in the production and consumption of vegetables and herbs, foraging for wild food in the valleys surrounding his riverside cottage and cooking the results of his exploits.