Buying In - (Page 37) buying in 37 bles community. “The time has arrived for brands to take their place among others as new iterations of community in contemporary society,” argued Douglas Atkin of the ad agency Merkley + Partners, in a book called The Culting of Brands. Albert Muniz, an assistant marketing professor at DePaul University, has been studying “brand communities” for years. “I had an old Saab in grad school,” he explained to me. “It was beaten up, and people would stop me and have thirty-fiveminute conversations in parking lots about my car. I got intrigued about what was going on and started interviewing people and going to Saab dealerships and observing people.” He was studying “the community around Saab.” Muniz argued in an early paper on the subject (co-written with Thomas C. O’Guinn of the University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana) that brand communities are real communities. When I asked him about this, he acknowledged that it’s more typical to cite the culture of consumption as something that undermines social togetherness, not creates it. But he countered that groups of Saab, Bronco, and Apple admirers—all studied by Muniz and O’Guinn— even possessed “a sense of moral responsibility.” That responsibility is rather limited: The examples tend toward things like Apple users giving one another free technical and troubleshooting advice. But his point is that they do it selflessly, out of a sense of community. “Our point of view is: This is a human phenomenon, we are social beings,” Muniz told me. “If community gets lopped off over here, it will emerge somewhere else.” I doubt that Muniz’s idea of community would pass muster with Robert Putnam, who underscored the importance of creating social capital that extends beyond a group and to a larger vision of society. But it’s easy to see why equating mutual
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