Brand Africa: We and They

Research on consumer-brand interactions is often dedicated to the scrutiny of how consumers relate to their brands and other users within the context of tangible product (goods) brand usage, e.g., in subcultures of consumption (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), consumer tribes (Cova and Cova 2002), brand communities (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001; Schau et al. 2009), and online communities (Kozinets 2010), inter alia. The tendency to focus on goods may be due to the capacity of such tangible products to embody and convey meanings more effectively than intangible, service brands. However even in this latter case, studies on consumer collectives appear to assume that intra-group brand interactions are voluntary, thereby neglecting the analysis of “forced” bonds. Investigating the less conventional but increasingly popular label “brand Africa,” this chapter looks at how members of online African diaspora communities relate to the “brand” and make sense of other members’ emotions and perceptions. Based on the conceptualization of brands as socially constructed phenomena, a netnographic, inductive theory development approach is adopted in this chapter.