Tribal marketing

: is there a tribe within the tribe?

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to understand if the “consumer tribe” group of researchers have similar characteristics to a “consumer tribe”. It aims also to provide additional conceptual clarity between brand community and consumer tribe concepts. This research uses a mixed method approach composed of two stages. First, it uses a systematic literature review to map out the literature on brand community and consumer tribe, allowing the identification of the characteristics of the researchers involved. Descriptive data was hand collected for all brand community and consumer tribe articles in peer reviewed journals over the last 30 years (67 articles, 158 authors). Second, one model was adopted to help identify the possible existence of a tribe (Silva and Santos, 2012), which uses the data collected in stage one to distinguish the two concepts and identify the presence of a tribe amongst consumer tribe researchers. The findings suggest the existence of a tribe among the consumer tribe researchers leaded by Bernard Cova. This research argues that as a consequence of this tribalisation manifesto made by consumer tribe researchers, and its future of this tribe is at risk. This research topic can end up being included on the umbrella of brand community, being seem only as a different term for a concept that already existed, however with a different name.

Date of Award	27 Feb 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Susana Silva (Supervisor)