Marketing professor’s ‘brand community’ research gets broad attention

An article on the concept of "brand community" co-authored by Thomas O'Guinn, a marketing professor with 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 was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in March 2001. In it, O'Guinn and his co-author, Albert Muniz, Jr. of DePaul University, 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, who is the executive director of the Center for Brand and Product Management at the UW–Madison School of Business.

O'Guinn maintains that consumer demands to be taken seriously are driving the creation of brands and influencing how the brand 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 paper's impact was announced earlier this month 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. His research interests focus on the sociology of consumption, brands, advertising, branded entertainment and visual communication. He came to Wisconsin from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a college scholar at the College of Communication. O'Guinn also has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Texas at Austin.