Porsche Owners Club: Key Characteristics of a Brand Community Essay

Introduction

A brand community refers to the non-geographical community ties that build on social relations regarding the brand values. Although brand communities are based on geographical concentration, in some instances, the general depiction presents their existence in the entire non-geographic internet space. Brand communities portray distinct complex cultures, traditions, behavior codes, and rituals. This situation depicts the brand members having unique elements that drive their identification and participation in the particular communities. Through the progression, these communities ensure influential perspectives on other members. There are several brand communities, including Apple Newton, Porsche Owners Club, play-station, a girl, figment, and Starbucks idea. This paper examines the Porsche Owners Club brand community characteristics, emphasizing rituals and symbols that bind community members with the encompassing advantages and disadvantages of brand communities for marketers.

Characteristics of Porsche Owners Club Brand Community

Porsche Owners is an American club brand community that encompasses numerous enthusiastic members and business developers. The community consts of several well-structured clubs based in different geographic locations in Canada and United States. Additionally, the community operations involve the regional clubs maintaining separate websites for their activity and content sharing (Imrie, 2018). It also engages in social and tracks events, driving instructions, club meetings, and dinners. The brand community maintains a consistent connection with the Porsche management despite the organization’s lack of formal affiliation. The company is legendary in sports car manufacturing with an encompassing tradition in high-performance racing. It maintains many years of performance in the automobile manufacturing industry as a private entity.

The Symbol at Porsche Owners’ Club Community

The Porsche brand community symbol depicts a value system that accommodates each member. Apart from caring for the car production, it creates a valuable and cultural system for the members and is less likely to lose people’s membership. It celebrates the best results in life and aspires to support good friends and conversations that realize the world’s finest automobiles. The brand community ensures members’ racing competition, including showcasing prized possessions and knowledge dissemination regarding technical issues in the car industry (Imrie, 2018). The brand community’s efforts focus on creating value for the members and improving consumer experience and skills. The brand community has a wonderful experience in the identity group due to the monthly magazine production, the Porsche Panorama, which focuses on informing the company’s progression.

The community’s value system contributes to its existence over a long period constituting extensive member maturity. The solid membership establishment that consists of the company members creates a long-lasting experience for the community. Additionally, the brand community allows for personal interaction during generated events and activities, ensuring bonding and identification moments portraying the exclusivity progression from non-members (Imrie, 2018). Its outstanding values and culture contribute to community stability and business enhancement, basing on the long-lasting relationship among the members. Additionally, the community symbol is critical in creating a sense of belonging and identity in brand loyalty.

Rituals at Porsche Owners’ Club Community

The Porsche Club brand community’s rituals aim to help the members enjoy and experience the wonderful expeditions in their racing cars. Through the events, members stand a better chance of stating feedback regarding the racing car values and indicate informative suggestions concerning better adoptions that improve brand service performance. The group constitutes several types of rituals, including civic, cultural, and family generations based on the activity and event associations (Andéhn et al., 2020). These rituals convey a special message concerning the brand members, such as identifying exclusive clubs and consumer loyalty and emotions. They create a valuable and significant sensation to the public allowing for positive brand evaluation.

Additionally, the Porsche American Club membership constitutes numerous rituals, including autocross, driving experience, rally, club racing, and parade. Autocross refers to a short closed-course driving activity that focuses on achieving a safe completion. The event allows the participating members to utilize the shortest time possible in completing the course safely. The community ensures consumer retention in the best and quality services for the course requirements through the activity.

Through driver education, the Porsche community brand allows for regional driving programs to gain essential skills. The learning progression allows the members to understand car driving in various circumstances. The activity motive focuses on skill improvement in the driving ventures and high performance (Imrie, 2018). Additionally, the activity equips the consumer community with the right skills in the driving arena that ensures identity and loyalty to the company’s brands. Another ritual example is rallying, which focuses on disseminating fundamental knowledge to the members. The rally ritual follows a course particularly on public roads ensuring precise detail specification regarding the rule application. Through the ritual, the members learn to adhere to public road rules and regulations and improve the racing capabilities, which are vital in the competitive business world (Andéhn et al., 2020). These activities ensure a positive progression regarding the manufacturing company to the consumer influence and high identification level.

The community also participates in the Concours exhibitions that contribute to its shinning advancement. The exhibition is a judged event that requires car preparation and presentation in the best condition. It aims at point denotation basing on the maximum values in terms of cleanliness and condition (Imrie, 2018). This activity allows the members to present the cars’ prized possessions, encouraging an operation that gives value to the consumers who are likely to associate with the best commodities. Lastly, the Porsche parade is vital in the brand community to attract a global gathering, and the event venues change each year.

Membership and Consumer Loyalty in the Porsche Brand Community

Membership loyalty in the Porsche club community entails cultural observance and characteristics upholding. The loyal members identify with the community’s explicit characteristics, such as exclusivity, prestige, and mystique identification of legendary sports cars. Members enthusiastically participate in the company event provisions as they engage their vehicles in experiential operations to their advantage. The brand members depict successful and performance-oriented characteristics in their activity progression (L’Espoir Decosta & Andéhn, 2018). Additionally, they are independent individuals portraying a passionate and value expression in their vehicles. For instance, individuals engage in debates regarding the best methods of washing a Porsche, indicating the brand connection’s value systems. The brand community rests in the great social aspects contributing to the successful advancement in advertising and promotional capacities. The encompassing meeting blended with track events forms a fundamental basis for aspects in community building. The bonding events include monthly dinner meetings that allow the members to share information and ideas that build the community.

Additionally, the bonding aspect involves the monthly newsletters that disseminate similar information to the members. The community provides national magazines to the members and allows for occasional visitations in different regions. The community’s activity advancements ensure information sharing and connection through current internet social modes, such as email. Through the several activities and meetings that the organization promotes, the brand community depicts its loyalty and identification in the bonding moments. The members can freely suggest improvement requirements while supporting the best practices (L’Espoir Decosta & Andéhn, 2018). As the consumer feels the community’s value through the bonding activities and the encompassing magazines and newsletters, they strengthen their identification and loyalty levels influencing other customers in the regions. Loyalty to the Porsche brand depicts the consumers’ contribution towards its wellbeing. The company has been in operation over the last 60 years and still works to the competitive advantage.

Advantages of Brand Communities for Marketers

Marketers gain a lot from brand communities due to numerous advantages, such as customer loyalty and evangelization, feedback and new ideas dissemination, content publications and SEO, and PR opportunities. Due to customers’ provisions for expression, they are more likely to portray loyalty towards the brand. The platform allows for the interaction of new clients and brand loyalties, creating a positive impression for the marketers (Andéhn et al., 2020). The platform’s top contributors are brand evangelists by informing others on the organizational progression due to the values gained. The community attachment to the brand entails positive implications where they indicate loyalty that bars them from shopping in different markets. Through the progression, the loyal consumers strive to purchase the particular brands even when they entail high prices and other inconveniences. This progression is advantageous as the brand communities promote customer retention while improving the organizational reputation of marketers. Additionally, the brand communities escalate the marketers’ ability to stand out by differentiating them from competitors.

On loyalty, the brand community creates a moral responsibility to each other and the product. The community’s devotional nature also entails recruiting new participants and the encouragement of new brand users. This situation improves the competitive markets’ business position as customers and supporters increase (Andéhn et al., 2020). The community, in its capacity, acts as fellow owners of the brand as they oblige to new members’ recruitment. Businesses gain through the community members’ advocacy to consumer involvement in the brand use. The brand communal activities involve rendering moral and support to fellow users and new consumers. Community participation reinforces brand reality and uses advocacy that works to the business advantage.

Brand communities are also vital in generating feedback, new ideas, and information. The society response is essential since it will help the organization to understand the needs of the customers. Marketers benefit from these communities by learning new information and feedback from customers. Through conversations, marketers learn their products’ strengths and weaknesses and improve where necessary while building on the positives (Imrie, 2018). Marketers gain new ideas that enhance their advancement suggestions which aim at better results. The industry’s brand communities’ fundamental values entail creating profitable products and maintaining value to the users.

Another advantage entails brand communities’ enhancing marketing strategies through content generations and SEO. As the community creates content regarding the brand and venture into interaction with each other, the progression improves the marketers’ SEO. When communities share publications that move around the network, they create a better search engine position. The process takes a gradual progression and is advantageous for marketers as the search engine results implicate relevance in the content (Rademaker et al., 2020). The situation attracts numerous customers as individuals with similar questions or challenges regarding the content are more likely to understand new ideas. The marketers have better chances of ranking higher as their domains serve as discussions in the social media advancements and email.

The brand communities play an essential role for marketers through ensuring PR opportunities. The communities enhance these opportunities’ availability depending on the content publication influence (Andéhn et al., 2020). Through article publications, brand communities can create PR opportunities by volunteering for charitable causes or ensuring marketing campaigns. This advancement enhances the marketers’ ability to popularize their brands in extensive ways. Marketers can also ensure personality in their brands through the community utilizing value and ethics demonstration. The brand users identify with the marketers through their identity in the working area. Due to the community enlargement, organizations realize brand visibility which attracts more people in the discussion out of curiosity and desire for new ideas. Marketers utilize such opportunities in gaining new clients and potential connections.

Disadvantages of Brand Communities for Marketers

Brand communities enhance loyalty to the specific product over several provisions of different competitors in the market. The loyal customers in specific brands will ensure to purchase the products irrespective of the prices and under inconvenient circumstances (Imrie, 2018). Despite the numerous advantages for businesses emanating from brand communities, several disadvantages encompass the situation. As the brand communities ensure loyalty by spreading positive information regarding particular products, they can also create negative sentiments to potential customers through anti-brand comments. Some loyal dissatisfied customers can spread negative information about particular brands, either through word of mouth, on social media, or directly to the business site affecting the evangelization advancements.

Moderating a community is difficult, and it can publish negative content regarding a particular brand relating to a business that goes round to other potential customers. As marketers attempt to ensure more strict measures, the community views the operation as biased (Andéhn et al., 2020). Through lenient moderation, it creates a family-friendly progression resulting in the loss of business focus. Additionally, establishing a brand community is difficult for growing businesses that require to venture more in investment to realize a competitive advantage. The marketers have to ensure a lot of finance and resources to achieve product visibility through the brand community.

Through brand community, the businesses operate with numerous distractions implying their inability to participate in the events successfully. This situation indicates that, for a company to gain from community loyalty, it should establish a mutual relationship with the consumers through the inspiration of nurturing the brand development (Rademaker et al., 2020). The marketers have to invent various aspects that could motivate the community in the active participation that depicts loyalty and advocacy. This circumstance involves feedback and suggestions on better ways of improvement.

The theoretical implication depicts brand communities participating in trash talks and stereotyping aspects for the in-groups and outsiders. These brand communities can create a rivalry in the inter-group relations, ensuring a hostility between companies producing the same products (L’Espoir Decosta & Andéhn, 2018). For instance, as brand communities in dominant businesses generate individualistic views of their innovative and creative progression in the market products, they ensure rivalry with small and upcoming businesses, especially when the operation involves negative sentiments regarding the different groups. This situation is so as the small business’s individualistic information lacks expertise in production and low-quality brands. Despite the brand communities ensuring a market for the favorable and flourishing businesses, it establishes hostility in the competing companies and the inability for the small ones to find their way up the marketing spectrum.

In conclusion, brand communities depict distinctive characteristics that implicate their attachment to specific company products. There are numerous brand communities in the business spectrum portraying substantive traditions, rituals, symbols, and cultural activities that are different from others. Focusing on the Porsche Club community entails unique characteristics that bind the members, including the symbol and ritual activities. The business’ symbol operation constitutes the value it ensures for ball members and its ability to produce the Porsche Panorama newsletter informing individuals on the activity progression. It allows for members’ participation in various rituals, such as autocross, driving experience, rally, club racing, and parade, enhancing their enjoyment and experience with new cars. Through the advancement, the members ensure their loyalty to the brand by participating in the given activities and events, including dinner meetings and regional visitations. Brand communities play a significant role in the marketing strategies depicting the advantageous and disadvantageous categories. The community advantages include the loyalty and evangelization capabilities that ensure a moral responsibility to the members’ support and encouragement of new consumers to the brand purchase. It also contributes through content publication, SOE, and PR opportunities, ensuring brand visibility in the marketing world. Nevertheless, brand community identification creates a challenge in the market industry when it engages in negative sentiments on in-group dissatisfaction and other competitor’s brands. Marketers need to venture into brand communities’ support for business growth and marketing strategies.

References

Andéhn, M., Hietanen, J., & Lucarelli, A. (2020). Performing place promotion—On implaced identity in marketized geographies. Marketing Theory, 20(3), 321−342.

Imrie, J. (2018). Seeking to understand Subaru’s turbocharged appeal: A study of brand communities, product utility, and corporate promotion [Master’s thesis, Bryant University]. Web.

L’Espoir Decosta, J. N. P., & Andéhn, M. (2018). Looking for authenticity in product geography. In Authenticity & tourism (pp. 15−31). Emerald Publishing.

Rademaker, C. A., Stafford, M. R., & Andéhn, M. (2020). Managerial–consumer eco-harmful media perceptions and eco-conscious attitudes: Understanding the context within green media. Journal of Advertising Research, 60(3), 290−304.