Brand Community and Symbolic Interactionism: A Literature Review

This paper reviews and synthesizes existing literature on symbolic interactionism (SI), and on brand communities (BCs). On the one hand, it was found an interest on SI as a sociological perspective to address a wide range of topics affecting human behavior. On the other hand, advances on BC were found mostly in the fields of marketing and branding, although these communities have a clear sociological basis. Our review identifies several SI premises that help explain BCs as social contexts of symbolic interaction, identifies SI as an optimal approach to study the collective and symbolic dimension of consumption, and offers a systematic, in-depth analysis of relationships between SI and BC, thus broadening the scope for sociological research applied to marketing and brand management.