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Marketing Professor’s “Brand Community” Wins National Acclaim

May 17, 2007

An article on the concept of “brand community” co-authored by a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business is one of the 20 most-cited papers in the field of economics and business worldwide.

The paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in March 2001, was co-authored by Thomas O’Guinn, executive director of the business school’s Center for Brand and Product Management, and Albert Muniz, Jr. of DePaul University.

The paper coined the term “brand community” —now commonly used to describe a connected group of admirers of a brand. In the paper, they demonstrated that wired groups of consumers behave similarly to traditional communities and present significant challenges and opportunities for marketers.

“Brand communities have changed the basic marketing paradigm in that it has forced marketers to realize the enormous importance of consumer-to-consumer communication in a wired world, where groups of consumers may speak not with the voice of one, but with the power of thousands,” says O’Guinn.

O’Guinn maintains that consumers are demanding to be taken seriously in co-creation of a brand, and even in how it is marketed. Several major companies have consulted O’Guinn and his colleagues, and the idea of brand community has become an important concept in 21st century marketing.

“The response to Tom's work on brand community is a reflection of the impact his thinking has had on other academics and on industry and is still more recognition of how our marketing faculty are at the forefront of important research," says School of Business Dean Michael Knetter.

The paper’s impact was announced this spring by Thomson Scientific,  a company that provides information about innovation to businesses and academic institutions, and quantitatively tracks the impact of scientific contributions.

O’Guinn came to the UW-Madison School of Business in 2006 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a college scholar at the College of Communication. He also has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and Duke University.  His research interests focus on the sociology of consumption, brands, advertising, branded entertainment and visual communication. The Center for Brand and Product Management offers a highly regarded Wisconsin MBA career specialization in brand and product-management skills.