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Brand
Brand communities: loyal to the communities
community or the brand?
Gianluca Marzocchi, Gabriele Morandin and Massimo Bergami
Department of Management, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy 93
Received 12 January 2010
Abstract Revised 28 August 2010
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the relative emphasis accorded by Accepted 9 January 2011
members of a brand community to identification with that community and identification with the
brand-owner, and thereby close a gap in the literature to date.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on a review of the literature relating to identification,
loyalty, and potentially mediating brand-related constructs, a cross-sectional questionnaire-based
survey was carried out at a brandfest organised by a major European motorcycle manufacturer. Data
collected from 256 respondents were analysed by structural equation modelling, testing seven
hypothesised causal links.
Findings – Brand loyalty is primarily influenced by identification with the brand community,
through the mediating role of brand affect.
Research limitations/implications – The findings require confirmation in other settings and
industry sectors before they can be generalised with confidence, but point to several fruitful research
directions.
Practical implications – Brand strategists have new evidence to guide allocation of effort and
resources to the effective cultivation and maintenance of brand loyalty.
Originality/value – The study makes an original contribution, in a real-world setting, to the
understanding of how members of a brand community relate to the brand, and of how their brand
loyalty is activated.
Keywords Brand communities, Brand loyalty, Social identification, Motorcycles, Europe,
Customer behaviour, Brand management
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
The concept of consumers’ identification with brands or companies has been well
reported and discussed in the literatures of marketing, consumer behaviour and
psychology. Consumers can also identify with what have been termed “brand
communities” (Cova, 1997). Muniz and O’Guinn (2001, p. 413) have argued that these
“become a common understanding of a shared identity”, while McAlexander et al.
(2002, p. 38) extend the concept in asserting that “communities tend to tend to be
identified on the basis of commonality or identification among their members”. While
some studies have investigated single and specific targets of identification, none has
investigated the possibility that consumer-company identification and
consumer-community identification exert independent and equivalent impacts on
relevant loyalty-related outcomes, and if so to what extent. The research question to be
addressed is therefore: how important are identification with the brand owner and European Journal of Marketing
Vol. 47 No. 1/2, 2013
identification with the community, respectively, in building loyalty in a brand pp. 93-114
community? Accordingly, this paper develops and tests a theoretical model to explain q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0309-0566
the impact of identification constructs on loyalty-related outcomes. An understanding DOI 10.1108/03090561311285475

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EJM of this process is an important input to strategic decisions concerning the relative
allocation of effort to the fostering of consumers’ identification with the company, with
47,1/2 a brand community or with both. An informed strategy will be capable of exploiting
the full potential of the customer base to spread positive referrals and activate other
tangible actions, to the benefit of the company and its products (Gremler and Brown,
1999).
94 Furthermore, defining and measuring an “identification” effect necessarily entails
placing it within a broader conceptual framework. It is not simply a matter of
establishing the existence of a causal connection between brand loyalty and
identification with a brand owner or brand community (or any other theoretically and
managerially relevant construct). It is further necessary to understand which variables
play a mediating role in this relationship. In our own study, attention will be focused on
two of those other constructs: brand trust and brand affect. These variables were
chosen because they perform a central and significant role in studies of loyalty and the
relational commitment that is its primary expression (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001;
Venetis and Ghauri, 2004; Ball et al., 2004; Esch et al., 2006), and because the literature
has already described them as a potential consequence of identification (Gwinner and
Swanson, 2003; Kuenzel and Halliday, 2008; Thompson and Sinha, 2008; Shen and
Chiou, 2009). This in turn led to attention than before being focused on the triangular
network of interrelationships among:
.
consumer-company and consumer-community identification;
.
brand trust and brand affect; and
.
brand loyalty and its associated behavioural intentions.
Hence, the article’s sub-goal is to clarify the mechanisms that community members
enact in the process of constructing loyalty. In particular, it aims to determine whether
this process is driven by affective reactions (that is, brand affect), by trustworthiness
connections with the brand (brand trust) or by both, and to what degree. At the
theoretical level, a significant contribution to the literature of brand communities
would be made by linking the identification constructs with a system of dependent
variables relevant to marketing actions.
The remainder of the paper:
.
develops the conceptual model and research hypotheses;
.
discusses the empirical context of the research design, data collection procedures
and measurements adopted;
.
presents the results, and discusses their theoretical and managerial implications;
and finally
.
identifies the limitations of the study and fruitful directions for future research.

Theoretical development and research hypotheses

A long and sustainable “ripple loyalty effect” (Gremler and Brown, 1999), to the benefit
of the firm, can result only from a customer base sharing the firm’s mission and values,
as far as they could be hedonistic or ephemeral. The role of brand communities in this
process has been seen as a possible route to “the Holy Grail of brand loyalty”
(McAlexander et al., 2002, p. 38), in recognition of the ability of the identification
process to convert brand and company attractiveness into predispositions to act

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(Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006a, b). This mechanism demands to be explained in greater Brand
detail, which is what this paper aims to do. communities
Social identification in brand communities
In an early, influential statement, Mael and Ashforth (1992) defined social identification
as the individual perception of actual or symbolic belongingness to a group. Ellemers
et al. (1999) proposed that the phenomenon had three components: cognitive 95
(awareness of one’s membership), evaluative (positive or negative connotations
attached to group membership), and emotional (involvement in the group). In addition
to arguing for conceptual distinctions among the components of social identity,
Ellemers et al. (1999) demonstrated that they are empirically distinct in an
experimental study, while Bergami and Bagozzi (2000) confirmed the results in a
real-world context.
The activation of these three components, which this study took into consideration,
permits individuals to define themselves as members of social categories and ascribe to
themselves characteristics that are typical of those categories. As a result, by the
process of social identification, individuals perceive themselves not only in terms of
idiosyncratic characteristics that differentiate them from other individuals, but also in
terms of the characteristics they share with other members of their in-group (Hogg and
Abrams, 1988).
The subject of social identification and its impact on individual behaviour has taken
on increasing importance in customer relationship management. This fact should come
as no surprise, given that the establishing of strong, deep, stable and enduring ties with
the customer base is a constant priority in the theory and practice of contemporary
marketing.
More recently, the study of social identification has attracted interest in explaining
the psychological bond with the community and the admired company, beyond the
behavioural implications of such membership.
While most studies have focused on identification with the brand community (for
example, Algesheimer et al., 2005), few have examined the role played by the company
in establishing such relationships and, more specifically, the influence exerted by
customer-to-company identification. To our knowledge, none simultaneously
considered identification with the community and the company, investigating the
attitudinal and behavioural implications from the community members’ perspective.
The distinction between customer-to-community identification and
customer-to-company identification is relevant for at least three reasons. First, since
it is widely acknowledged that people can identify with multiple targets (Johnson et al.,
2006), it is relevant to know both which is the main target of identification for
community members and which exerts the most influence on loyalty and other
desirable outcomes. Furthermore, it is important to study multiple social identities
simultaneously because social identifications at any level tend to form and become
salient through comparison with a reference group: the members of the next more
inclusive self-category. The attractiveness of an in-group is not constant, but varies
with the subordinate self-category that furnishes the frame of reference for intergroup
comparison. Hogg and Turner (1985) demonstrated that enhancing the salience of
membership of a social category increased self-stereotyping and self-definition and
produced attitudes and behaviour consistent with the content and meaning of those

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EJM categories in society. As a consequence, multiple identifications are dependent on
47,1/2 context (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). The perceived salience of group membership may be
a product of both the extent to which an individual is already involved in a group and
the existence of other groups within his or her ambit.

Brand trust and brand affect

96 The centrality of the identification construct within the conceptual framework
discussed here poses a significant research challenge, that is to assess if the main
target of identification for brand community members is the brand-owner or the
community, and which one exerts the strongest influence on marketing-relevant
outcomes. The relevance of the causative effect of these two forms of identification on
key marketing outcomes may reside in two relevant constructs, brand trust (Moorman
et al., 1993; Morgan and Hunt, 1994) and brand affect (Dick and Basu, 1994; Chaudhuri
and Holbrook, 2001), to which the literature on relationship marketing has attributed a
central role when defining the factors conducive to reinforcement of relational ties with
customers.
Brand trust is defined in this literature as the willingness of consumers to rely on
the power of the brand to realise its stated purpose, and brand affect defined as a
brand’s ability to draw out a positive emotional arousal in the consumers as a result of
its use (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001). Three variants of brand trust are hypothesised
by Sheppard and Tuchinsky (1996), on the basis of its content or cognitive antecedents,
namely: calculus-based trust, knowledge-based-trust and identification based-trust.
Knowledge-based trust is self-explanatory. “Calculus-based” describes a form most
commonly encountered in the work environment, which is based on a calculation of the
probable effects of perceived rewards and deterrents on the behaviour of the third
party. “Identification-based” is most common in personal life, and defines the situation
in which the two parties have internalised each other’s expectations and intentions to
the extent that they do not need to calculate probable outcomes. Regarded as the
highest form of trust, it can be developed in the business context, where it may build
into the co-creation of joint products or goals, and commitment to company’s shared
values. Dwyer et al. (1987) have similarly theorised that company’s shared values
contribute to the development of commitment and trust, while Morgan and Hunt (1994)
proposed that they are a direct precursor of trust. Delgado-Ballester and
Munuera-Alemán (2001) also found evidence that involvement with the owner-brand
influences and moderates brand trust.
Similarly, identification with the community should reinforce brand trust, as a
consequence of the “customer bonding” effect in brand community settings (Szmigin
and Reppel, 2004, p. 628). Describing the stages of the customer bonding process, they
proposed that the identity phase, characterised by the development of a stronger
customer attachment to the company, reinforces the perceived reliability of the brand.
In this phase, the relationship is extended to a third party, the community, “where
customers are not only bonding to the organization but also with each other”.
While awareness of membership in a social group reflects the notion of
self-categorisation, it is also important to consider the implications of such affiliation
from an affective perspective, specifically with regard to possible consequences of social
identification with a target group. For example, an experiment by Ellemers et al. (1999)
found that affective commitment mediated displays of in-group favouritism, both in

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terms of evaluative ratings and allocation of outcomes. A study in an organisational Brand
context by Bergami and Bagozzi (2000) confirmed this result, in showing that affective communities
commitment was a direct consequence of organisational identification.
Frijda et al. (1989) further found that contact with a group was associated with
feelings of attachment and belongingness. Membership provides an opportunity for
individuals to express their emotions, and direct their behavioural tendencies in a way
that reinforces the positive affect associated with that membership. In the context of 97
the study reported here, identification with a brand community is expected to have a
direct impact on brand affect, according to the degree of emotional involvement with
the social group. The attachment and belongingness a person feels toward a
community should reinforce the pleasure of association and, in turn, his or her in-group
favouritism.
Other research studies have revealed the existence of strong ties between social
identification and various types of organisational commitment and citizenship
behaviour. Manifestations of identification-based commitment, or trust, might be
co-operation and effort (Bartel, 2001) or voluntary financial contributions
(Bhattacharya et al., 1995). Since consumption is the primary dimension in the
consumer-community or consumer-company relationships, “such identification-based
commitment is likely to be expressed through a sustained, long term preference for the
identified-with company’s product over those of its competitor” (Bhattacharya and Sen,
2003, p. 77). Brand trust and brand affect should thus be regarded as key consequences
of consumer-company identification. Consolidating the theoretical arguments reviewed
so far, we hypothesise that:
H1. Consumer-to-company identification has a positive impact on brand affect
(H1a) and brand trust (H1b).
H2. Consumer-brand community identification has a positive impact on brand
affect (H2a) and brand trust (H2b).

Loyalty and key marketing variables

The notion of trust as an antecedent to the building and maintaining of a positive and
lasting relationship between partners forms a cornerstone of the conceptual framework
of relationship marketing (Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Starting from a common platform
of trust, parties can focus on the long-term benefits of the relationship, thus enhancing
competitiveness and reducing the costs (actual or behavioural) of the transaction. It
thus seems legitimate to hypothesise, as do Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001) and
Sirdeshmukh et al. (2002), that brand trust has a direct impact on attitudinal loyalty
and indirectly affects consequent behaviour. Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) suggest that
those responses will be to exhibit ‘behavioural loyalty’, and voluntarily to engage in
‘social promotion’ (by word of mouth) and ‘physical promotion’ (through endorsement
of the brand, display of brand symbols and logos, for example on clothing, and
purchase of branded memorabilia). However, following Chaudhuri and Holbrook
(2001), a distinction is made between attitudinal loyalty, a long term commitment
toward a product or a brand, and behavioural loyalty, manifested in repeat purchases
of a product or brand. For the purposes of this study, attitudinal loyalty is considered
as an antecedent of behavioural loyalty as was suggested by Uncles et al. (2003) in the
case of high involvement goods.

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EJM The literature relating to trust also gives grounds for hypothesizing a positive
relationship to both resilience to negative information and propensity to comment. The
47,1/2 first of those links appears to be immediate: the very definition of trust is associated
with concepts such as confidence and reliability, and the consequent rejection of
negative information that third-party sources might disseminate about a company
(Moorman et al., 1993). More formally, two factors recognised in the literature as
98 consequences of trust can be said to intervene as attenuators of the impact potentially
generated by negative information: reduction of uncertainty and increase in relational
commitment (Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Dahlstrom and Nygaard, 1995).
When attention is shifted to the relationship between trust and propensity to
comment on a company, the theoretical debate becomes more complex. Much of the
specific literature has emphasised the role of communication as a driving factor in
building a relationship of trust, and many authors, such as Anderson and Narus (1990)
and El– Ansary (1993) among others, consider this variable to be an antecedent of
trust. In fact, considering communication simply as an antecedent of trust may be
justifiable only where the phenomenon is analysed statically. In dynamic terms, it
seems evident that the establishment of a trust relationship will in turn improve the
quality of future communication. The literature on the mechanisms of communication
within a distribution channel has long highlighted the existence of a positive impact of
trust on the quality of communication among partners (Mohr and Nevin, 1990). It thus
seems legitimate to hypothesise that the trust a consumer develops in a brand will also
foster a more open and direct flow of communication, which may take the form of
explicit support for the manufacturer of the brand. Recently, Sweeney et al. (2008)
found evidence of such a relationship in their critical incidents study, which we aim to
confirm in this study with a complementary quantitative approach. It is thus
hypothesised that:
H3. Brand trust positively affects attitudinal loyalty (H3a), resilience to negative
information (H3b) and propensity to comment (H3c), ceteris paribus.
H4. Attitudinal loyalty positively affects behavioural loyalty (H4a), social
promotion (H4b) and physical promotion (H4c), ceteris paribus.
Moreover, the direct influence exerted on brand loyalty by positive affective responses
has been investigated by Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001, p. 84), who concluded from a
broad sample of studies of the relationship between emotional states and commitment
that “the close relationship of a brand with its consumers (i.e. commitment) also tends
to reflect the level of positive affect generated by that brand” and that “strong and
positive affective responses will be associated with high levels of brand commitment...
brands that make consumers ‘happy’ or ‘joyful’ or ‘affectionate’ should prompt greater
purchase and attitudinal loyalty.” They conceded that consumers “may not always
purchase the brands they ‘love’ for reasons of high price and so forth”, but generalised
that “brands that are higher in brand affect should be purchased more often and should
encourage greater attitudinal commitment”. Based on these further theoretical
arguments, it is hypothesised that:
H5. Brand affect positively affects “attitudinal loyalty”, ceteris paribus.
Lastly, we took into account “attitudinal loyalty” (sustained preference for the
company and its brands), “resilience to negative information” (that is, the ability not to

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be influenced by events with a negative impact on the company image) and Brand
“propensity to comment” (the predisposition to overtly direct suggestions and
criticisms towards the company) as consequences of consumer-to-company
communities
identification and consumer-to-community identification. These constructs derive
from the work of Bhattacharya and Sen (2003, p. 84), who proposed a general model of
the influence that the psychological process of identification has on attitudinal and
behavioural dimensions. We agree with their assertions that “empirical testing is the 99
logical next step in establishing the validity of our model and our proposition” and that
“because of the number of constructs in the model and the complex relationship among
them, it is best to test it in two or more parts before testing the entire model”.
Besides the justifications for the previous causal links offered by Bhattacharya and
Sen (2003), we borrowed ideas from the European Customer Satisfaction Index (ECSI)
model (Ball et al., 2004; Vilares and Coelho, 2004), which hypothesis a direct connection
from company image to loyalty. As the attractiveness of the company image is
associated with organisational identification (Dutton et al., 1994), our model posits that
identification may influence loyalty-related constructs.
In addition, Gremler and Brown, discussing the Bhattacharya et al. (1995) results
argue that the more an organisation gets customers to identify with the corporation,
the more likely that the customer base will develop behaviours to the company’s
benefit. Ahearne et al. (2005, p. 5) have suggested that when customers identify with
the organisation they “tend to purchase more and recommend the company’s products
more often”. Concurrently, Algesheimer et al. (2005), found that customers identifying
with a brand community tended to be supportive and pass on positive referrals for the
company and its products. Finally, Shen and Chiou (2009) found evidence that when
customers perceive similarity with other members of the community, they treat one
another like family and will display commitment to the group and its mission.
Consolidating the empirical evidence and the theoretical arguments reviewed so far, we
hypothesise that:
H6. Consumer-to-company identification has a positive impact on attitudinal
loyalty (H6a), resilience to negative information (H6b) and propensity to
comment (H6c), ceteris paribus.
H7. Consumer-brand community identification has a positive impact on
attitudinal loyalty (H7a), resilience to negative information (H7b) and
propensity to comment (H7c), ceteris paribus.
Figure 1 summarises the conceptual model, linking the process of identification with
the genesis of brand loyalty through brand attitude and brand trust, which our study
was designed to test empirically.

Method
Research setting
Our study sets out to answer the research question, “how important in building loyalty
in a brand community are identification with the brand owner and identification with
the community, respectively?” by means of a cross-sectional study of a sample of
participants at a “brandfest”. McAlexander et al. (2002, p. 42) describe this kind of
event as a means to “provide for geotemporal distillations of a brand community that
provide normally dispersed member entities with the opportunity for high-context

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EJM
47,1/2

100

Figure 1.
The conceptual model

interaction”. Their distinctive feature is thus that they concentrate, in space and time,
the three fundamental dimensions that characterise a community:
(1) sense of common identity among members and the perception of distinctiveness
from non-members;
(2) shared rituals and traditions, which exist to perpetuate the community’s culture
and history; and
(3) a sense of group solidarity, typically manifested as a sense of duty to help
fellow-members of the community (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001).

This makes a brandfest a relevant and appropriate context in which to conduct an

empirical investigation of brand loyalty, in terms of individuals’ identification with the
brand-owner’s company and with the community itself.
The study investigates the brand community that emerged and developed around a
major motorcycle manufacturer, Ducati, which operates on a global scale from its
Italian base. This industry setting and product category were chosen for two
fundamental reasons. The first, which is common to a large part of the literature on
identification and, within that, to research on brand communities, is the broad
agreement in the literature that some categories of products are more likely than others
to trigger a process of identification between individual consumers and the product
(McAlexander and Schouten, 1998) or, in this case, the brand. Such products are rich in
expressive, hedonic and experiential qualities. More specifically, they are characterised
by: a high degree of involvement in the purchasing process; a pattern of use implying
high levels of emotional involvement; a collective or social dimension in usage of the
product, potentially resulting in interpersonal bonding; and the possibility of
establishing mental associations with the strong ethos and heritage of the brand and
projection of its image through ownership. The specific choice of the sports motorbike
sector, as a case in point of such characteristics, ensures that the sphere of
investigation will be favourable to the development of the hypothesised relationships.
The second reason is that the ambition of our study is not limited to testing the
existence of a direct causal relationship between identification and loyalty (by no

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means a minor objective in itself). It is in fact to deepen understanding of that Brand
relationship by placing the identification-loyalty dyad within the context of a broader communities
system of relationships, in explicit competition with such other loyalty-generating
mechanisms, already amply described in the literature, as the impact of the brand trust
and brand affect constructs. With this aim in mind, we therefore deliberately turned
our attention to a product sector in which we could legitimately construct a purely
theoretical hypothesis, a priori, of the existence of a strong identification effect. The 101
test to which we intend to submit the hypothesis thus becomes even more stringent.
The absence of a statistically significant link between the company identification and
community identification constructs and the marketing variables, or the presence of
only a weak correlation, would provide strong grounds for arguing that causal factors
not immediately tied to identification play a competing role.

Sample selection
The research questionnaire was administered by face-to-face interviewing to
motorcyclists during the last World Ducati Week, an international “brandfest” in
Italy. It was attended by between 40 and 50 thousand Ducati enthusiasts from around
the world, and included technical demonstrations, sponsored entertainment and social
gatherings.
No sampling frame was available via the company, registered participants being
only a partial subset of the total attendance. Several precautions were adopted to rule
out major discrepancies between the ideal population of interest and the sampled units.
Data were collected on every day of the event. To ensure unbiased selection of
respondents within each day’s quota, individual sample units were selected by
applying a modified version of the shopping-centre data gathering technique
suggested by Sudman (1980). By this means, a total of 256 questionnaires were
collected. Given that the refusal rate was less than 2 per cent, no correction for
non-response bias was necessary.

Sample profile
The sample was 83 per cent male and 17 per cent female, a gender balance consistent
with the known profile of riders of the Ducati range of high-performance motorcycles.
The age range was between 16 and 65 years, with a mean of 31. Each region of Italy
was well represented, and 5 per cent of respondents were attending the event from
other countries, mainly in Europe. Almost 60 per cent of the sample had completed
high school, and 15 per cent were educated to degree level. In terms of employment, 58
per cent were blue-collar workers, 20 per cent entrepreneurs and self-employed, 15 per
cent students and 2 per cent retired, leaving 5 per cent classified as “others”. Almost
three quarters of respondents owned one motorbike, 84 per cent of which were Ducati.
Among the remainder, 14 per cent had three or more and 13 were non-owners.
Members of Ducati riders’ clubs accounted for just under a quarter of the sample, while
20 respondents were Ducati employees and 41 were shareholders. The remaining
majority were simply aficionados of the brand.

Measures
The original questionnaire was prepared in English and then translated into Italian,
using standard back translation procedures, for distribution at the brandfest. The

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EJM Appendix shows the measurement items for each scale we employed and the original
47,1/2 source of the scale. All items, unless specifically indicated, employed a seven-point
Likert scale. The items are mostly derived from previous published research, with
minor wording adjustments to fit the context of our study.

Results
102 Of the 256 questionnaires collected, 245 were fully completed and usable for analysis.
Structural equation modelling was used to test the seven hypothesised causal links. In
the first stage of the study, the confirmatory factor analysis capabilities of Lisrel 8.54
were used to examine the tenability and robustness of the measurement sub-models
more closely, before the fit of the full structural model was assessed.

Measurement models
To ensure that all constructs were measured adequately, a two-step
measurement-model analysis was performed. First, all constructs and their
indicators were subjected to a single confirmatory factor analysis, in order to
establish the internal consistency and discriminant validity of the latent factors
included in the model. Second, the measurement sub-model for the two identification
constructs (company and community) was tested, assuming two second-order factors.
The full measurement model for the latent factors, built with 14 latent constructs
and a total of 31 indicators, yielded very satisfactory goodness-of-fit statistics:
x 2 ð343Þ ¼ 514:91, p < :00; RMSEA ¼ 0:04, SRMR ¼ 0:04, NNFI ¼ 0:99, CFI ¼ 0:99.
Composite reliabilities for the 15 multi-item scales ranged from a minimum of 0.78 to a
maximum of 0.94, all well above the value of 0.60 accepted in the literature as
indicative of internal consistency (Bagozzi and Yi, 1988). From a discriminant validity
standpoint, the result was equally satisfactory: none of the 95 per cent confidence
intervals of the w-values included the value of one, providing evidence of the fact that
the factors are in fact distinct from one another.
The measurement sub-model for the two identification constructs (company and
community) was tested, assuming two second-order factors. Goodness-of-fit statistics
in this case were satisfactory x 2 ð47Þ ¼ 186:26, p < 0:00, RMSEA ¼ 0:11,
SRMR ¼ 0:10, NNFI ¼ 0:95, CFI ¼ 0:96. All three components of organisational
identification (as depicted in Figure 2) loaded highly on the related factor, the affective
component most strongly (average g ¼ 0:96), followed by the cognitive component
(average g ¼ 0:85) and the evaluative component (average g ¼ 0:67). Discriminant
validity having been tested by verifying that the 95 per cent confidence interval of the
w-value included the value of one (w21 ¼ 0:58, s:e: ¼ 0:05), a more formal test was
performed by comparing the model under scrutiny with a more restricted model in
which the off-diagonal element of the F matrix was constrained to unity. In a x 2 test, a
significant difference in the values between the more restricted and less restricted
baseline model (370:99 2 186:26 ¼ 184:73; df ¼ 1) pointed to a rejection of the null
hypothesis that the two constructs are not distinct.

Structural model
The structural model, as represented in Figure 3, exhibits satisfactory goodness-of-fit:
x 2 ð257Þ ¼ 648:83, p < 0:00, RMSEA ¼ 0:07, SRMR ¼ 0:06, NNFI ¼ 0:96, CFI ¼ 0:97.
The significant x 2 value is a quite usual occurrence in the case of samples of this size.

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 Brand
communities

103

Figure 2.
Parameter estimates in the
second-order confirmatory
factor analysis

Figure 3.
Structural equation model
parameter estimates

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EJM As hypothesised, consumer-company identification had a significant influence on
47,1/2 attitudinal brand loyalty (b ¼ 0:13, s:e: ¼ 0:06), on brand trust (b ¼ 0:45, s:e: ¼ 0:08)
and on brand affect (b ¼ 0:22, s:e: ¼ 0:08). Two hypothesised paths failed to reach
statistical significance: consumer-company predicted neither resilience to negative
information (b ¼ 0:12, s:e: ¼ 0:09, n.s.) nor propensity to comment (b ¼ 0:16,
s:e: ¼ 0:12, n.s.). Similarly, consumer-community identification significantly affected
104 the constructs of attitudinal brand loyalty (b ¼ 0:22, s:e: ¼ 0:07), propensity to
comment (b ¼ 0:22, s:e: ¼ 0:11), brand trust (b ¼ 0:23, s:e: ¼ 0:08) and brand affect
(b ¼ 0:55, s:e: ¼ 0:09). Contrary to expectations, it marginally failed to predict
resilience to negative information (b ¼ 0:16, s:e: ¼ 0:09). The squared multiple
correlations for structural equations having brand trust and brand affect as dependent
variables are 0.39 and 0.51, respectively.
Most of the variance of the attitudinal brand loyalty construct (squared multiple
correlations 0.77) is explained by brand affect (b ¼ 0:46, s:e: ¼ 0:07). Brand trust in
turn has a significant positive effect on this component of brand loyalty (b ¼ 0:24,
s:e: ¼ 0:05) and resilience to negative information (b ¼ 0:46, s:e: ¼ 0:09), but no
significant effect on propensity to comment (b ¼ 20:12, s:e: ¼ 0:09, n.s.). Finally, the
attitudinal form of brand loyalty has, as expected, a strong influence on behavioural
brand loyalty (b ¼ 0:81, s:e: ¼ 0:06), the social and physical components of personal
promotion of the company (b ¼ 0:93, s:e: ¼ 0:06; b ¼ 0:95, s:e: ¼ 0:06). Squared
multiple correlations for structural equations having resilience to negative information
and propensity to comment as dependent variables are 0.41 and 0.08, respectively.
Table I summarises R 2 values for endogenous variables in the structural model.

Discussion
The central research question of this study was which of the two modes of
identification, consumer-company or consumer-community identification has the more
significant impact on the development of brand loyalty in a member of a brand
community. Though further research is needed before the results can be confidently
generalised, the answers suggested by analysis of the survey data do offer insights,
and permit tentative conclusions to be drawn in the next section.
First of all, we have confirmed the existence of the distinct foci of identification in a
real-world context, and found that both exert a significant and positive influence on
brand loyalty. As Table II shows, identification with the brand community has the
stronger effect, by a considerable margin.

Endogenous variables R2

Brand affect 0.51

Brand trust 0.39
Attitudinal brand loyalty 0.77
Behavioural brand loyalty 0.66
Table I. Social promotion 0.87
R 2 values for endogenous Physical promotion 0.90
variables in the general Resilience to negative information 0.41
model (see Figure 3) Propensity to comment 0.08

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Second, even if consumer-company and consumer-community identification influence Brand
both brand affect and brand trust, the analysis revealed that identification with the two communities
objects activates different psychological processes in brand community members’
minds. As the structural equation coefficients in Figure 3 show, identification with the
company has a stronger influence on brand trust while that with the brand community
has a stronger impact on brand affect. The former focus seems to activate a cognitively
mediated process, reinforcing the reliability and confidence in the brand, whereas the 105
latter acts on the emotional and affective dimensions of the brand schema. It would
obviously be rash to rule out the possibility completely that these results could be at
least partially influenced by sample self-selection bias during data collection, probably
over-representing the proportion of customers particularly sensitive to the affective
dimensions of the brand. Nevertheless, the relationship seems relevant enough to be
deserving of further scrutiny.
Third, brand affect was found to be a stronger antecedent of the attitudinal
component of brand loyalty than was brand trust. Both modes of identification also
influence that variable, but with a weaker impact. As Table II shows, the results
suggest that the causal path consumer-community identification ! brand affect !
attitudinal loyalty is the primary causal connection among all the possible paths
linking the identification constructs to attitudinal loyalty, in terms of absolute
magnitude. Moreover, in the table, the patterns of path and effect, and the coefficients,
suggest that brand affect, besides exerting a stronger direct effect on the attitudinal
component of loyalty than brand trust does, also acts as the most relevant mediator in
the indirect identification-loyalty causal links, by the very substantial margin of 0.35 to
0.17.
At a more detailed level of analysis, the findings of the study confirm the positive
impact of consumer-company identification on attitudinal loyalty and, through this
mediating variable, on the constructs of behavioural loyalty, “social promotion” and
“physical promotion”. No evidence was found of a direct impact on resilience to
negative information or propensity to comment. They similarly confirmed that
consumer-community identification had a direct and positive impact on the attitudinal
component of brand loyalty and a mediated effect on its behavioural component, and
on the social and physical forms of personal promotion of the brand. A significant and
positive relation was also found between consumer-community identification and
propensity to comment. However, the path from consumer-company identification to
propensity to comment was not significant. Surprisingly, identification with a brand
community is a much stronger predictor of “voicing” behaviour with respect to the

Path Effect Value

Consumer-company ! Attitudinal loyalty Direct 0.13

Consumer-community ! Attitudinal loyalty Direct 0.22 Table II.
Consumer-company ! Trust ! Attitudinal loyalty Indirect 0.11 Direct, indirect, and total
Consumer-community ! Trust ! Attitudinal loyalty Indirect 0.06 effects of
Consumer-company ! Affect ! Attitudinal loyalty Indirect 0.10 consumer-company and
Consumer-community ! Affect ! Attitudinal loyalty Indirect 0.25 consumer-community
Consumer-company ! Attitudinal loyalty Total 0.34 identification on
Consumer-community ! Attitudinal loyalty Total 0.53 attitudinal brand loyalty

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EJM company than identification with the company itself. Finally, the coefficient for the
47,1/2 path connecting consumer-community to resilience to negative information was not
significant.
A final noteworthy finding was the preponderant role played by brand affect and
brand trust, both positive and significant, in explaining loyalty causally. The
dimensions represented by these two constructs, more usually discussed in the context
106 of relationship marketing, seem to exert a stronger and more direct influence on loyalty
than the identification constructs. Their important contribution is further underscored
by the strong predictable impact of trust on resilience to negative information. Brand
trust, more than company identification, seems capable of explaining the cognitive
resistance of consumers to any negative information they may receive about a
company.

Conclusion
The primary theoretical objective of our study, relevant to the marketing implications
of organisational identification, was to seek evidence for the direct impact of
identification with a company and identification with a brand community on loyalty to
the company and on a correlated set of marketing-related dependent variables. A
subordinate (but relevant) goal was to assess the relative strength of those predictors.
In parallel, the study aimed to compare this loyalty building mechanism with the
influence exerted by other variables, through causal links of established relevance.
Attention was focused on two constructs, brand trust and brand affect, with the aim
of gaining further insights into the complex network of relationships linking them to
identification with a the brand owner and with a brand community.
Some of the study’s findings offer a promising contribution to current
research-based knowledge. First, the proposed model highlights the scope and
complexity of the conceptual framework in which the relationship among the two
forms of identification, brand affect, brand trust, and the attitudinal and behavioural
forms of loyalty is embedded. The study’s findings suggest that affect and trust appear
to have a greater direct impact on loyalty than identification does. This evidence seems
to call into question the recent emphasis in the literature and in marketing practice on
the role that enhanced customer-company identification may play in establishing a
deeper, more stable commercial relationship. In fact, there is significant empirical
support for the existence of a causal path in which identification acts as an antecedent
of both brand trust and brand affect. The amount of variance in those two constructs
that can be explained by consumer-company and consumer-community identification
is respectively 39 per cent and 51 per cent. Above and beyond the statistical
significance of the relationship, this very large total proportion of explained variance
highlights the relevance of the causal path in question, and the relevant mediating role
played by affect and trust in the relationship between identification and loyalty. The
results are consistent with the investigation by Jeppesen and Frederikson (2006) into
the reasons for users contributing to firm-hosted communities, which found that
members wish to be recognised by the firm and may want to identify more strongly
with the firm than with their peers.
Second, the conceptual framework presented here justifies a more complex
interpretation of the relationships between company, brand community and brand
than has been proposed in the literature to date. The IBC (integration in brand

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community) construct first proposed by McAlexander et al. (2002, p. 44) is based on a Brand
holistic view of the web of relationships linking individuals to a product, a brand, a communities
company, or other users, within the “reference brand community”. Their analysis
suggests that “consumer-centric relationships with different entities in the brand
community might be cumulative or even synergistic in forming a single construct akin
to customer loyalty”. The IBC model, tested by means of a second-order four-factor
confirmatory model, ultimately postulates the existence of covariance among the 107
constructs comprising it, traceable to a common factor labelled “integration in brand
community”. Our own study sought to model this covariance. On the one hand, it
confirms the existence of a system of relationships among customer, brand, company
and brand community; on the other, it seeks to differentiate between the contributions
made by each component to customer loyalty.
Finally, the empirical test of our model provides partial support for the hypotheses
formulated. While the data supported the hypothesised causal effects on loyalty, the
most surprising finding was the failure of consumer-company identification to exhibit
a significant impact on the resilience to negative information and propensity to
comment constructs. While we consider that it is a task for future studies to establish
whether this result derives from a simple idiosyncrasy of the data or is a structural
element that needs to be taken into account in the process of refining the underlying
theory, we do not refrain from providing a tentative interpretation of this unexpected
outcome. In our opinion, a potential answer lies in one of the main contribution of this
paper, namely the uncovering of the different psychological processes triggered by
identification with the company and with the brand community, among members of
that community. Identification with the company seems to activate a cognitively
mediated process, reinforcing the perceived reliability of the brand and confidence in it,
whereas identification with the community acts on the emotional and affective
dimensions of the brand schema. So it is not surprising to find that the impact of
consumer-company identification on resilience to negative information is in fact
significant (indirect path value 0:46* 0:45 ¼ 0:207). In short, it is not direct but instead
fully mediated by the propensity to trust the brand, a strongly cognitive variable. On
the other hand, the same cognitive imprint of consumer-company identification may
explain its failure to influence propensity to comment. Voicing behaviour can be
facilitated both by social support and social interaction, two distinguishing features of
brand communities. In fact, we note the significant impact of consumer-community
identification on propensity to comment.

Managerial implications
It is easy to understand why the marketing management community should be
particularly interested in the effects of consumer-company identification on the one
hand, and brand communities on the other, for their potential to increase brand equity
(McAlexander and Schouten, 1998; Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001) by means that are more
cost-effective than more traditional strategies, such as advertising. The possibility of
evaluating the absolute effectiveness of identification and community-based marketing
actions, and thereby justifying the investments they entail, remains the priority
concern. Later, once that evaluation is positive, management attention can be focused
on assessing the relative effectiveness of initiatives to build and foster brand
communities, by determining the optimal portfolio allocation with respect to the

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EJM different forms of investment in relationship marketing at the organisation’s disposal.
47,1/2 From this specific management perspective, it is thus important to establish whether,
on the one hand, the role of identification in supporting loyalty is negligible compared
to the impact of more conventional forms of marketing investment or, on the other, it is
capable of supporting (and in part replacing) them. Indeed, a complex picture emerges
from this study.
108 The empirical results provide robust support for the hypothesis that a consumer’s
identification with a brand community leads to higher levels of both attitudinal and
behavioural loyalty to the company itself, as well as stronger propensity to comment
favourably and constructively on the company. This is a strategically important
finding, providing initial confirmation, albeit partial, of the role played by investments
aimed at fostering the development of a healthy and strongly identified community of
brand enthusiasts. In any case, it should be emphasised that the strongest influence
exerted by cohesive communities is related to a stronger affective response and greater
trust in the brand, and only subordinately (and mainly indirectly) to loyalty and other
forms of what is called prosocial behaviour. In this regard, strategic planners should
understand that investments in the growth and maintenance of brand communities
activate a wide set of mutually reinforcing benefits for both customers and the
company itself.
Though the propensity-to-comment factor could in practice prove to be a burden for
the company, it is likewise true that spontaneous willingness to pass comment, make
suggestions, voice support, and generally engage in dialogue can be a valuable source
of early insight into market demands, which will in turn be inputs and stimuli in the
process of product-line development or updating.
Further, our findings confirm the relevance of a positive relation with the brand to
the development of the loyalty-related constructs, at least for products and services
with a hedonic and emotional content, as exemplified by motorbikes. In fact, even if the
power of an attractive brand is already widely recognised in the literature and in
managerial practice, the findings of this study help to disentangle the effects of brand
trust and brand affect on loyalty among brand community members.
Finally, the study sheds light on the mechanism inducing individuals to look for
contact with business firms and the reasons why more and more companies are
“unlocking their doors” to customers, in order to involve them actively in the firm’s
environment. Of course, some form of co-operation between customers and companies
might yield more mutually satisfying outcomes. In this sense, brand communities,
besides contributing to the spread of curiosity and passion attaching to a brand in the
market, could be important sources of new ideas and product innovations, whose
origins are not so much traced back to commercial interests, per se, as to the desire to
share experiences, foster common values and improve user learning. Far from being
isolated consumers, users may be organized in communities, leading to better joint
outcomes for consumer and firm alike. All these efforts direct our thinking away from
atomistic frameworks, where the organisation and consumers are treated as distinct
actors seeking to promote their own utility through mutual exchanges, towards more
holistic constructed meanings, in which boundaries become permeable and blurred,
and social identities form to the benefit of individuals linked to the organisation as well
as to the organisation itself.

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Limitations and directions for future research Brand
An unquestionable limitation of this study is the specificity of the research context: a communities
single brand of sports motorbike and a company-specific annual brandfest. Given the
predominantly social nature of motorcycling and of such gatherings, effects deriving
from identification with the company, and above all the community, could legitimately
have been expected. Though the impact coefficients tied to the identification constructs
could thereby have been over-emphasised, the very choice of research setting permitted 109
a more stringent verification of the mediating role played by two non-identification
constructs, namely trust and affect with respect to the brand in question.
A second limitation derives from reliance on cross-sectional data collected during
the three days of the brandfest. This study-design choice is justified by the nature of
the hypotheses formulated within the framework of the research objectives. A possible
follow-up study would certainly include a longitudinal perspective, as suggested by
Muniz and O’Guinn (2001).
As with all attempts to build theory and extend results from a limited setting and
restricted constructs, one must be careful when generalising these findings. We do not
rule out the possibility of other conceptualisations and conclusions. For one example,
other foci of identification might be considered within a framework of multiple
identities. A brand community based on small groups of individuals who know one
another (Dholakia et al., 2004) could be an additional source of promising findings, as
well as virtual communities (Shen and Chiou, 2009).
Furthermore, it is self-evident that brand communities grow up around different
sports and products, and specific examples of sports broadcasting and journalism, and
further studies are called for to validate the findings. The antecedents of identification
also demand further investigation, if a better understanding of the identification
processes and further validation of the Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) model are to be
achieved.
Lastly, since customers with differing loyalty levels may respond better to
differentiated strategies (McMullan and Gilmore, 2008), future research contributions
may clarify how identification with different targets (or other social-psychological
constructs) can affect levels of loyalty and other relevant marketing-constructs.

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Further reading
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Corresponding author
Gabriele Morandin can be contacted at: gabriele.morandin@unibo.it

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Appendix. Measurement items Brand
communities

113

Figure A1.

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EJM
47,1/2

114

Figure A1.

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