Using Means-end Chains to Build Mobile Brand Communities

Brand communities are a traditional concept to enhance customer attraction, loyalty and retention (e.g. Tupperware, Apple Macintosh). Brand communities are supported through either companies or customers themselves. Companies that are able to encourage their customers to interact stimulated by the brand could position the brand value proposition of their product as a link between their customers and employ the developing brand communities for marketing purposes. To stimulate this kind of interaction, companies have increasingly used Internet functionalities in the past years. Drawing on the overwhelming penetration rate of mobile devices of over 80 percent in Europe, we propose to employ the mobile channel to support this kind of brand community building process. We derive four constitutional elements of brand communities based on existing research and develop a structured and theoretically founded four step method to analyze the potential of mobile services for specific community building purposes and compare our findings to a mini case study.