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 Part I
Conceptual
Foundations

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 1
Tribes, Inc.: The New
World of Tribalism
Bernard Cova, Robert V. Kozinets and
Avi Shankar

Introduction
You hold in your hands a book that spans current thought about the role of
the tribal in contemporary commercial society. Its chapters cut across the con-
tinents ranging from the philosophical to the grounded, from critical conjec-
ture to ethnographic evidence, sampling a range of tribal identities, activities
and practices along the way. In this chapter, we seek to add another concep-
tual piece to the contemporary jigsaw puzzle that is the current world of
tribal consumption by considering some of the powerful tensions between
commercial culture and communal collectivities that this book’s topic and its
chapters raise.
Consumer Tribes, the title of this book, is difficult and problematic. In the
first place, the groups of people we examine in this book are doing far more
than what is commonly glossed by the terms “consumer” and “consumption”.
In common parlance and dictionary definitions, consumers are those who “use
up”, “destroy” or “deplete” economic goods. But the Consumer Tribes in the
chapters of this book are doing far more than that. They do not consume things

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 4 Consumer Tribes

without changing them; they cannot “consume” a good without it becoming

them and them becoming it; they cannot “consume” a service without engaging
in a dance with the service provider, where the dance becomes the service.
Participatory culture is everywhere.
No doubt there are some people who may take exception to the creativ-
ity and agency ascribed to consumers in this book’s chapters. For a start they
may say the term “consumer” has become naturalized and normalized, not just
within everyday business speak but also in everyday political speak too. From
this view, “people” have been turned into “consumers” and are passive victims
of the current, dominant mode of the capitalist system – an ideology of neo-
liberalism – and its global, corporate juggernauts. To be sure, Marxian inspired
theories of hegemony and ideology, although increasingly out of favour these
days even within sociological and cultural studies circles, are an important
addition to the critical examination of contemporary business practice. Marxian
concepts such as commodity fetishism, reification, and commodification still
provide perceptive insights for our understanding of a market society. But this
passive absorption model of consumers is not what we see in the chapters of
this book. Active and enthusiastic in their consumption, sometimes in the
extreme, tribes produce a range of identities, practices, rituals, meanings, and
even material culture itself. They re-script roles, twist meanings, and shout back
to producers and other groups of people while they fashion their own differen-
tiation strategies. They both absorb and resist the pre-packaged, off-the-shelf,
brand-and-product meanings of marketers.
So, in the first instance, let’s be clear that Consumer Tribes rarely consume
brands and products – even the most mundane ones– without adding to them,
grappling with them, blending them with their own lives and altering them.
Consumer Tribes do things. Consumers are people, yes, but people who live
in a specific social and historical situation. This places them in a co-dependent
relationship with commercial culture, one where industrial and post-industrial
information economies create not only things, but critical elements of cultural,
social, and self-identity, and where those identities are at both the bottom and
the top of the proverbial economic–industrial–political pyramid. So let’s be con-
tent for the moment in stating that consumers are consumers primarily in that
they take commercial identities as important aspects of themselves and their
collectives, that they use these identities to relate to themselves, to other people,
and to the world around them through lenses that incorporate a vast range of
commercial and commercially produced pursuits, objectives and definitions of
the self.
And although it is currently in vogue, the term “tribe” opens up yet another
a hornet’s nest of unwelcome associations. Perhaps most alluring of all is the
notion that by calling a phenomenon “tribal” we have somehow explained
it. Like a semantic undertow, Consumer Tribes constantly draws us back to a
Rousseauian version of contemporary society: a primitivist longing for bet-
ter bygone days; a nested and natural nostalgia for a more pristine and closer
world, where nature enclosed and emplaced humanity; where small kin-
like groups of people bore tighter social bonds and loving links to the Earth;

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 5

where people were unburdened of repressive social logics and expressed

themselves freely and in harmony; where daily life was openly charged
with natural animal sexuality; where humans were free to breathe in the
animist and transcendent spirit of the world; and finally where people were free
to find their True Selves.
Jacques Barzun (2000) reminds us that the idealist vision of the past, of
a place of powerful primitive retreat, is a constant cultural component of the
Modern Age (for marketer’s take on the retro, see Brown, 2001; Brown and
Sherry, 2003; Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry, 2003; Cova and Cova, 2002). In this
volume, Robin Canniford and Avi Shankar’s chapter on surf culture examines
the construction and allure of the tribal metaphor. They identify how colonial
discourse constructed surf culture through tribal tropes and later how com-
mercial culture re-appropriated this tribal symbolism to imbue products and
services with a sense of “otherness”, excitement and danger. This otherness, the
idea of a wild or natural human state to which we can return, or at least taste a
little bit, is a myth whose potency has diminished little over the past 200 years.
It refers us to some very important aspects of the phenomena we study here –
the hunger of community, expression, transcendence, a natural state (see e.g.,
Goulding, Shankar, and Elliott, 2002) – and yet it is certainly not the whole story –
the Consumer Tribes in this book are less rigid and fixed than their anthropo-
logical counterparts.
For the past decade or so, and inspired in part by the application of the
theories of one the contributors to this book, Michel Maffesoli (see his chap-
ter in this book), a new understanding of Consumer Tribes has emerged
within marketing and consumer research theory. This perspective rejects an
atomistic, overly individualistic, information processor view of people as
individuals who are to some extent sealed off and separated from their experi-
ential worlds – in short, assumptions underlying the type of research that
still dominates the text books, journal articles, and LISREL models of our
discipline.
Rather, a variety of studies from both a North American anthropological
tradition and a European micro-sociological tradition accept as axiomatic that
human life is essentially social. Social life is a rich, complex, kaleidoscopic
confusion that cannot ever be represented by “causes” and “effects”. Such
studies reject analyses of market-based phenomena through the imposition of
abstract modernist structures (class, age, gender, and so on), what we can call
a top down modernist sociology, in favour of what might be termed a bottom
up postmodern sociology. In this view, the building blocks of human social life
are not to be found in abstract categories applied to the analysis of social life,
but in the multiplicity of social groupings that we all participate in, knowingly
or not, through the course of our everyday lives. These tribus or little masses
(popularized as neo-tribes) are fundamental to our experience of life in general.
They differ from traditional tribes in an anthropological sense in one import-
ant way; we belong to many little tribes and not one tribe. From this perspec-
tive the consumption of cultural resources circulated through markets (brands,
leisure experiences, and so on) are not the sine qua non of contemporary

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 6 Consumer Tribes

life, rather, they facilitate what are – meaningful social relationships. As

Bernard Cova (1997) has argued the “links” (social relationships) are more
important than things (brands, products, experiences, ideas).
So it’s clear to say that when taken as some sort of explanation of contem-
porary practice, Consumer Tribes, our title, obscures more than it reveals.
As Henry Jenkins (e.g., Jenkins, 2006) teaches us, our mass mediated world
is filled with participatory personalities whose interests coalesce with com-
mercial culture, such as in his example of consumers’ interest in following
an American Idol candidate blending extemporaneously and temporarily
into tribal affiliations with Coca Cola bottlers around the world. These are
relationships of passion and, as Marianna Torgovnick (1996) reminds us, the
allure of the primitive, of the tribal, lies in its ability to arouse our desires and
passions.
In this chapter, we seek to delve deeper into the rotating cultural currents
swirling around these ideas of consumption and production, primitivism and
postmodernism, the commercial and the communal, nature and culture, past
and present, oppression and liberation, conformity and transcendence, and to
see what hybrid forms are born within them. As our headings, we offer state-
ments about Consumer Tribes that form four coherent themes running through
the chapters of this book: that Consumer Tribes are activators, double agents,
plunderers, and entrepreneurs (see Figure 1.1). Through example and asser-
tion, this introductory chapter circulates through meanings of consumers and

Tribes are
entrepreneurs
Degree of market annexation

Tribes are Tribes are

double agents plunderers

Tribes are
activators

Degree of market appropriation

Figure 1.1 Mapping Consumer Tribes.

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 7

tribes as it tracks moments of resistance, co-construction, and transcendence,

and finds within them new ways to see the relation of producers consumed,
and consumers produced.
In Figure 1.1, we seek to encapsulate the various identities and associ-
ated practices that Consumer Tribes adopt. These range along two continua.
The horizontal axis portrays the appropriation axis, the active tendency of
Consumer Tribes to poach their creative material from the commercial mar-
ketplace, a practice that often gets tribes into trouble. This can range from the
minimal appropriation of the double agent identity where, the Tribe enjoys
being the target subject, passing on information to brand owners for example,
and the distributor of marketplace objects, messages and meanings, to the
pirate-like plunderers, who actively play with and shape objects whose rights
may belong to other groups, invert and invent meanings, and spread their
own messages. On the vertical axis, we have the amount of market annex-
ing or building practices engaged in by the Consumer Tribe. On the low end,
this holds the playing within the market identity of the Tribe as an activa-
tor, wherein market-based norms and standards are respected, and the Tribe
is firmly identified with the role of Consumer. At the high end of the annex-
ation axis is the Consumer Tribe as entrepreneur, actively involved in entering
into and expanding the marketplace, on a common footing with commercial
producers as a creator of not only cultural and social value, but also economic
wealth. Consumer Tribes and their members can move between these different
active modalities and identities fluidly, shifting from one form of market inter-
action to another effortlessly.

Consumer Tribes Are Activators

There are clear tensions revealed by our title of Consumer Tribes. Are people
acting in some sense as self-regulating armies of robotic commercial drones or
are they vividly alive, dancers on a stage? Are they retreating into an idealized
past, or are they intrepid bricoleurs melding and collaging their way through
a postmodern present? The reality of course lies somewhere in between these
extremes; it is not “either or” but elements of both. They are players as in
performers, as in contestants, as in improvisers, supernumeraries, suzerains,
overseers. Play activates. Tribes are activators.
Before we can truly explore these notions of play, we need to grapple for a
moment with a question of control and freedom. Many contemporary stud-
ies of consumers are structured by a polarizing question. This question asks
whether consumption involves consumers choosing between two theoretical
alternatives. In one, they let themselves be immersed within and submerged
by the system of commercial consumption. In the other alternative, consumers
are dodgy dissidents who resist the market.
Based on the vision of Consumer Tribes, we would argue that this dichotomy
is a poor representation of what consumption actually entails. Of course, these
theoretical positions are not only extreme and ideal-typical but also strongly

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 8 Consumer Tribes

marked by notions of power and opposition (Aubenas and Benasayag, 2002)

that pose everyday questions in absolutist terms. We, of course, prefer Absolut
markets to absolute ones. Embedded in logics of manipulation and control, the
lens given by this dichotomous posing blurs the perception that “consumer
experience” is a complex, moment-by-moment, situated occurrence. Lived
experience is never simple and binary, but ever-shifting, full of adjustments
and hybridizations. To see consumer experience as a choice between slavery
and freedom, structure and agency, passivity and rebellion is to use an analyt-
ical frame that equates the increasingly subtle techniques of postmodern mar-
keting with the excessive manipulation of consumers.
However, we wish in this volume and beyond to argue for the delineation
of ever more subtle, nuanced, dynamic, and complex systems that are at work
in the commercial world. In these systems, consumers are not manipulated but
engage in tacit compromises (Rémy, 2002). Consumers, in other words, are not
näive about living in their commercial–material world: like Madonna, they are
commercial–material boys and girls. They know the game plan; they read the
playbooks; they know the strategy. Conscious of a partial manipulation, they
decide to what extent they will be manipulated and they manipulate too.
Consumers decide to what extent they will appear to be misled, to be truly
misled, to remember and to forget, and then mislead, and then manipulate
these manipulations in ways that enliven their daily lives and life (Badot and
Cova, 2003). “The neo-consumer model does not involve an individual who has
been manipulated and hypnotized but one who is mobile” (Lipovetsky, 2003,
p. 88) and can play, often simultaneously, at coupling hyper-commercialization
with de-commercialization. What we are trying to understand is a process
that lacks subjects, whether companies or consumers. Instead, we should be
thinking in terms of processes where subjects like companies and consumers
exist within the confines of a situation that no one truly cont rols. This is
play, improvizational play, playing by the rules and playing with the rules,
playing with the playbook and the other players, all elements that have been
noted as important by several consumer researchers over the last decade (e.g.,
Deighton, 1992, Deighton and Grayson, 1995; Grayson, 1998; Kozinets, Sherry Jr., [AQ1]
Storm, Duhachek, Nuttavuthisit, and DeBerry-Spence, 2004).
The central tensions of consumption and production seem almost to contain
within them the links to rituals of resistance and opposition, yet these rituals
all too often turn out to be playful, hollow or bereft of real animosity or vig-
our. This disappoints some (perhaps many) researchers, whose own ideological
stands tend to lead them to seek rebellious consumers, activists who will
change the system. Yet the dialectics of tribes and tribalism are often equal parts
playful and liberatory, a place where struggles against the system are cloaked
less in ideologies of resistance and more in identities of liberation. They often
take place in the context of a complex social process ever unfolding whose sig-
nificance lies not in the value of its players’ transactions but in the transaction
of its play values.
We can see the metaphor of Consumer Tribes as players who activate and
enliven a social process of commercial meanings and identity production–
consumption. This theme runs strongly through many chapters in this book.

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 9

In their chapter on the British Royal Family, Cele Otnes and Pauline Maclaran
unpack what seems at first to be obsessive fan behaviour into a tribal reconnec-
tion with history and tradition. In this reconnection, the mass media as societal
proxy and socially constructionist creator of past and present plays a crucial
role. Co-created through these institutional dynamics, followers of the British
Royal Family build and play with their own sense of belonging and heritage.
These topsy-turvy liberatory (or were they oppressive?) dynamics of com-
mercial culture are especially evident in the chapter by John Schouten, Diane
Martin and James McAlexander. Their chapter charting the evolution of con-
sumption meanings within the Harley-Davidson subculture or tribe questions
our extant notions of meanings such as “freedom” or “machismo” and then
shows how these meanings possess considerable semiotic flexibility when
constructed by different social groups. Another important and very comple-
mentary look at the plasticity of masculine meanings is covered in the chapter
on metrosexuality by Diego Rinallo, who looks at industrial- and consumer-
oriented Italian fashion tribes. In notions of oppositional acceptance of main-
stream “hegemonic” masculinity – that constrain male action but also give
metrosexuals something to individualize from and resist against – this chapter
demonstrates how semiotic ambiguity underscores and supports the playful
tribal venture. Meanings of masculinity and femininity are related fluidly to
fashion and both tribalize into smaller groups and detribalize, as smaller group
tastes become mainstreamed for wider acceptability.
In yet another related chapter, Jacob Östberg shows how the Stockholm Brat’s
tribalism is about carefully assembling, displaying and using various consump-
tion objects to create just the right ambience of coolness. All of these chapters
offer us a critical take on consumption meanings that illustrate beautifully
how important a deep contextualization of meaning is when we seek to under-
stand particular Consumer Tribes, with their immense proclivity for accepting/
resisting play and for acting within a complex social process as activators.

Consumer Tribes Are Double Agents

Like Walt Whitman’s metaphor of self, but literally true, tribes contain multi-
tudes. It is no wonder then that they are constantly contradicting themselves;
they are paradox incarnate. We emphasize with this construct the important
limitations that come with viewing all tribal or communal consumer behaviour
as oppositional or resistant. Many collective experiences tend to re-appropriate
products and services from the consumption system without consciously
associating any oppositional attitude with this act. For example, there is little
opposition in the fannish activities of aficionados who dig up and revive vin-
tage products like old Citroën cars (e.g., Génération 2 CV) or pre-war bicycles
(e.g., Confrérie des 650). In their own way, these groups are imbuing such prod-
ucts with meanings and usages that differ from the ones they originally con-
veyed. They use them as physical forms that are like tabula rasa – but not quite,
as the patina of age has not been completely worn clean of meaning – and
are made new again by the inscription of additional meanings. Building

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 10 Consumer Tribes

meaning through shared experiences and emotions constitutes a daily episode

in the creation, consolidation, and preservation of a communitarian sentiment
within these groups.
Moreover, certain re-appropriation actions are relatively spontaneous in
nature. Consider the way that “street persons” have hijacked Bavaria’s deluxe
[AQ2] beer, an 8.6 beverage that has now become a “street beer”. Or the horror felt
by deluxe champagne manufacturers Moët and Chandon when the working
class “Chav” subculture appropriated their luxury brand and bent its mean-
ings. Another example is offered by “flash mobs” (spontaneous get-togethers
for no ostensible purpose; see Rheingold, 2003) where email round robins are
used to organize gatherings of individuals with no shared past or future but
who are happy to temporarily invade some commercial premises on the spur
of the moment. For example, such a “flash mob” materialized in a Rome book-
shop. Between 200 and 300 people crowded the aisles, asking shopkeepers for
non-existent books. They broke into a round of spontaneous applause. Then
they dispersed. In the same neo-Situationist vein, Reclaim the Streets (www.
rts.gn.apc.org) is an anti-capitalist movement whose aim is for “local social–
ecological revolution to transcend hierarchical and authoritarian society”. They
use tactics like Street Football to protest outside gas (or petrol) stations. However,
in an interesting twist the idea of Street Football has been hijacked by the largest
lager brand in the UK, Carling, and featured in their latest television advertise-
ment. What all of these actions have in common is that they are experiences that
help products or services to transcend their status as mere merchandise, mere
things. The consumption object becomes the agent or the double agent.
The experience of transcendence enables people to enact a ritual of
decommercialization even as they continue to operate within a market frame-
work, that is, to work within the staging that brands and companies have
built. In Dougie Brownlie, Ian Hewer and Stephen Treanor’s chapter on Car
Cruisers we see the creative ways that commercial culture, in this case that
surrounding cars, is re-integrated into the lives of car cruisers. Moreover, the
staging of The Cruise temporarily invades spaces, like the deserted car parks
of out-of-town shopping centres at night. In this way the predominantly
young men are able to express their creativity and shared identity providing
them with a sense of community and belonging.
The success of a beer called Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) is also significant in
this respect.1 Since the 1970s, this venerable but watery brand, a flag carrier
for Pabst breweries, had struggled in the US markets. It hit its nadir in 2001
when fewer than 1 million barrels were sold, 90% below the 1975 peak. All of
a sudden, sales began to explode, with growth reaching 5.3% in 2002. Even
more significant is the fact that Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR to its fans) is omni-
present in San Francisco, New York or Chicago’s trendy bars today. PBR is
now the fifth biggest seller in Portland, America’s capital of micro-breweries,
right behind giants like Coors Light, Budweiser, Bud Light, and Corona.

1
Based on the data published in 22 June 2003, The New York Times Magazine and
October 2003 Business Digest, No. 134.

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 11

This breakthrough is all the more remarkable because it owes little to market-
ing done by the company that owns PBR. Pabst has done very little advertising
over the past two decades, operating as it does in a market where giants like
Budweiser or Miller think nothing of spending tens of millions of dollars to
increase market share. So how can we explain PBR’s sudden return to popularity?
The most interesting thesis is that, paradoxically, the absence of marketing
around the product may have contributed to its success. By the late 1990s, PBR
was suffering from poor distribution, a cheap reputation and an almost see-
through image. These traits, associated with the unfounded rumour of Pabst’s
impending bankruptcy, may have contributed to the beer’s being adopted by
so-called alternative circles, such as New York bike couriers, who inscribed
their own meanings on the brand. Pabst was so out it was in. So uncool it
became cool.
Cool people, people in the know, began consuming PBR without Pabst’s
executives having strategically targeted or even envisioned the possibility of
them drinking it. Because the brewery was originally based in Milwaukee,
and the Wisconsin brewery later shut down, PBR’s fans view their consumer
behaviour as a gesture of solidarity with workers from America’s heartlands.
Part of the story may be an act of resistance to the market economy and
unfettered globalization. Part of it might be, as Alex Wipperfürth (2005)
argues, sheer dumb luck, the “serendipity” of having your brand be at the
right place at the right time with the right set of (tired, square, or non) mean-
ings. The key for Pabst was not their marketing of the brand, but their not
marketing of it.
Faced with this re-appropriation by consumers, Pabst’s executives (sur-
prisingly enough, or perhaps with only the savvy that comes from being a
commercial giant like Miller) developed a marketing strategy diametrically
opposed to the customary managerial recipe for a fast moving consumer
product. The new strategy is based on no aggressive marketing, no new pack-
aging, no widescale media campaign and no spectacular contracts with sports
or music stars. Instead, Pabst is to have a low profile, as discrete a presence as
possible in underground circles, plus a few hundreds micro-projects like small
mountain biking competitions held on vacant lots, point-of-sales distributions
of badges or tee-shirts, financial support for local musicians, and so on.
A cynic might say that this low-key strategy is intended to help Pabst fly
under the collective cultural radar, to make people forget, or at least ignore,
that Pabst’s Wisconsin workers were all fired during the 1990s when the
brewery delocalized to Texas. At the same time, it would be wrong to view
the strategy as an example of contradiction, or even worse, as a manipulation.
The beer’s success is much more strongly rooted in a rejection of aggressive
marketing than it is in the distraction away from a corporate social respon-
sibility reckoning. Above all, PBR’s anti-capitalist image has been entirely
formulated by consumers themselves, and it would be difficult for them to
complain now if this image does not correspond entirely to reality. All they
can do is ignore the reality, as long as the company does not remind them of
it. This will be their compromise with the commercial world.

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 12 Consumer Tribes

These consumers will have been complicit with, but not tricked by, the way
PBR’s current image was built. In short, they are not trying to escape the mar-
ket (Kozinets, 2002a) but to play with it. And this play has magical overtones.
“Re-enchantment occurs through distancing consumption and production
from the structuring productivity and rational rules normally in effect . . . as
if consumption, freed from its normal and adult status as a duty, can return
to playfulness; the material world can become seat of the sacred again; con-
sumption can become (re)ensouled” (Kozinets, 2002a, p. 32). Consumer Tribes
breathe magic breath into dead and dying things, but they also suck the life
from thriving brands. They work both sides.
The metaphor Consumer Tribes as Double Agents runs through Clive
Nancarrow and Pamela Nancarrow’s chapter on how Seagram, the world’s
largest alcoholic drinks company tried to understand the “cool” people of a
“cool” inner city area of London. The dance between “producers” and “con-
sumers” casts the cultural intermediaries, the cool people, in an uneasy rela-
tionship, caught between the narcissism of being identified as “cool”, yet
potentially tainted because of their association with and bit-part in the market-
ing process – the identity tension between being a sell out or a cool urbanite.
How to face a world in which Consumer Tribes are Double Agents? We
maintain that enlightened marketing professionals should be humble and
almost self-effacing in nature. They will be concerned to avoid being guilty of
poor taste, to not push too hard, to avoid being seen as trying to structure the
experience of consumers and cramp their style, but also to spark and fan the
ever-flickering flames of transcendent enchantment. A related theme courses
through the chapter on a “non-marginal, non-stigmatized” brand community
by Hope Schau and Al Muniz. Drawing on autobiographical experience, this
ethnography of the Tom Petty fan community focuses on fans’ uneasy mainten-
ance of distance, the balancing act of kratophany that, the chapter’s authors
suggest, distinguishes mainstream devotion from marginalized fanaticism.
Although the music and entertainer inspired devotion that felt and looked
religious, this was subject to a rational temperance, a reordering of a social
world in which the commercial commingles with sacred realm.
Along similar lines are Paul Henry and Marylouise Caldwell’s explor-
ation of the Cliff Richard Meeting House. In this chapter, we learn how fans
develop a type of para-social relationship with Cliff Richard that involves
careful psychic negotiation by tribe members. To be a proper and appropri-
ate fan requires the support of feelings of not being a fan. To avoid losing her
soul, the fan of the brand must be a double agent who can both care and cri-
tique, think and love, reach and resist at the same time.
Building-related realizations of delicate balance into marketing is light years
away from the sledgehammer models that powered the repetitive advertising
of the 1980s. Today’s marketers monitor their actions, and those undertaken
by their company, to ensure that they never fall prey to overkill. Salomon
understood this clearly when it wrote a charter stipulating the need to avoid
any misdeed that could lead to its being accused of behaving like some vul-
gar “world company” (Cova and Cova, 2001). The firm banished all frontline

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 13

actions that failed to entail a passion for sports. For example, local competi-
tion winners no longer receive mobile phones as their prize but the right to
demonstrate their skills to an audience of champions. Salomon has also
created new operations instead of transplanting them onto existing ones.
A single logic is at work here, one aimed at sustaining the passion for (and
practice of) sports through the organization of major meetings for fans’ benefit.
The company is careful not to co-opt its tribes, ensuring that all communica-
tions, including direct mail programs, are as un-aggressive as possible. The
goal is no longer to highlight Salomon’s image in a particular market but to
help the company become a fully fledged member of different tribal move-
ments, much as an individual fan can become, with all of the non-commercial
connotations that follow from such a positioning.
Consider the opposite example. Companies and their marketers need to
avoid affirming their capitalist vocation as loudly and overtly as Frank Riboud,
the CEO at Danone, a French food giant, did in 2001 with an ultra-commercial
discourse that shocked consumers and torpedoed their attempts to achieve the
double-agent’s ever-unsteady compromise with large corporations. That year, a
management study about possibly cutting back capacity in Danone’s European
biscuit operations was leaked to the press, where it was described as an ineluct-
able reality. A consensus hostile to the firm soon took shape and Danone was
accused of sacrificing workers to the demands of the financial markets. Frank
Riboud said that the restructuring was necessary in order to guarantee the future
success of the company and to make it competitive versus major rivals. Riboud
was accused of being overly focused on protecting the interests of Danone share-
holders. A critical website (www.jeboycottedanone.com) became a huge success,
sporting justifications such as “A boycott is the last remaining form of political action
in a society where money has profoundly perverted the democratic system.” Indeed,
once all other forms of interaction are excluded, all that remains for consumers
is to revert to the old solution of rejection and politically shaped activism.
Whether in their experiences with Pabst, Salomon, Tom Petty, or with other
products like Red Bull, consumers are not being misled by marketers and corpor-
ations. They are fully aware that what they dealing with are products emanat-
ing from companies that operate in a commercial world. At the same time, they
are free to choose the extent to which they want to be tricked in their consump-
tion experience. On empowering Web2.0 media like CurrentTV and YouTube,
they are free to “make their own (non-commercial) film” about a product, brand
or company, as long as the latter is careful to offer signs that are congruent with
this image and do not take on other, more commercial overtones. Walking a
tightrope of resistance and passion, the tribe acts as a double agent.

Consumer Tribes Are Plunderers

Tribes are not squeaky clean, by any means. They are often charged with act-
ing like pirates, and are often guilty as charged. Not only are they pirates,
but also they are marauders, pillagers, plunderers, hooligans, gangsters and

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 14 Consumer Tribes

hijackers. We argue that some of the charged ideas flowing from the polarizing
internal contradictions and complexities of Consumer Tribes can help to reveal
and delineate more nuanced and dynamic understandings. Two important
senses of their leaning towards plundering or “hijacking” are critical here –
one academic (de Certeau, 1980) and one pragmatic (Wipperfürth, 2005).
Michel de Certeau’s (1980) construct of hijacking followed from his cogita-
tion of the various primitive aspects of consumers over a quarter of a century
ago. Today’s consumers hijack things in a way that differs from the variant
that Situationists used to defend (Vanegeim, 1967), as explained by Michael
Borras,2 an Underground Internet Artist who manages the Systaime web-
site (www.systaime.com) which specializes in artistic hijacking: “The prin-
ciple underlying the name ‘Systaime’ [Trans. Note: A title incorporating the root
word “aime”, meaning love in French] is the idea that to by-pass a system (an IT
system, a political organization, etc.) or to hijack or subvert it, a person must
first be in love with it.” We can see in this statement the same ambivalence,
the same paradoxical qualities that inform our conception of the Consumer
Tribe as a Double Agent. Why would I steal something I didn’t care about?
Something is only worth plundering if it truly captures the heart.
Some of the same reasoning applied to consumption plunderings happens
on a collective basis. For example, activist consumer groups like The Media
Foundation (which publishes Adbusters; see Kozinets and Handelman, 2004;
Rumbo, 2002), The Billboard Liberation Front and the No Logo groupies of Naomi
Klein (2000) use their affection for the marketing system to subvert it. The Media
Foundation produces false advertisements call “subvertising” and has even
started manufacturing and marketing its own brand of anti-brand “blackspot”
shoes. These activist groups are not plentiful or powerful: they are not legion,
nor do they necessarily have the support of broad swathes of the general
population, even among young persons or web activists. The extreme nature of
“Adbusters” discourse, which tends to revel in revealing corporately sponsored
murder, linking America to the world’s consumption and environmental ills,
and decrying the consolidation of the media industry, is a poor reflection of the
complex and contradictory relationship people have to the commercial world
and its brands. However, without the extremely intense focus on the ghouls
of the corporate world and its dark legions of brands, Adbusters’ writers,
Naomi Klein, and other activist journalists would have little to write about.
The joy of plundering what one loves is found throughout the chapters of
Consumer Tribes, blended inextricably with the joy of creation and origin-
ation evident in the chapter by Dave Park, Sameer Deshpande, Bernard Cova
and Stefano Pace on the Warhammer tribe. Members of this tribe feel a sense
of accomplishment from personally creating figurines, painting them, and
assembling warrior replicas. Their research highlights how this tribal produc-
tion is not freed of structural constraints such as age, gender, and cultures.
The plundering and pillaging processes are evident in Stephen Brown’s
boisterous chapter on the Harry Potter tribe. So passionate are the Potter Tribes

2
Interview published in Technikart, No. 77, November 2003, p. 102.

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 15

that, amongst many activities, they write their own stories – hundreds of
thousands at the last count – produce their own podcasts, create their own
games like Live Action Role Plays, all distributed and mediated via the World
Wide Web. As Brown’s chapter illustrates, the waltz between brand owners
and brand community is often an uneasy one.
Robert Kozinets returns to his roots to examine a related phenomenon in the
Star Trek world, where Star Trek becomes both stolen property and gift. As pro-
suming productive consumers, Star Trek fans have a history of shoplifting the
text, then blowtorching their own elements into the mythic mix. The latest and
arguably greatest incarnation of this is fans’ creation of new episodes of the
show, written and starring themselves, broadcast to the world over the Internet.
Kozinets theorizes what happens when corporate pull yields to citizen push:
the vaunted and vaulted media property opens like a budding flower, becom-
ing wikimedia. The tribe becomes like a hive of active bees, collecting, organiz-
ing, creating, reproducing, distributing, making networks, closing deals, being
[AQ3] entrepreneurial (as we shall soon see): they become inno-tribes.
The phenomena are related what the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron (2003)
was demonstrating when he analysed the behaviour of today’s teenagers and
deduced that modern adolescence manufactures playful individuals, that is,
homini ludens (Huizinga, 1951). What we have is a playful humanity that dis-
obeys but does not rebel. Instead of confronting things, it bypasses and plun-
ders them. It lacks any illusion of utopia. Plunder and pillage is interesting
[AQ4] because it is temporary, a type of bracketing of tribe just a’movin’ through.
Just as the feral participants at Burning Man plunder corporate colours, logos,
and codes to welcome people to the “Black Rock Café” (Kozinets and Sherry,
2005), these people are engaging in dipping and diving into various social
worlds, with their various rules and relations to social and market logics end-
lessly shifting and morphing. Products, brands, companies, cultures, and
identities constantly change as one form morphs into another, and those forms
are altered individually and collectively shared.
For consumers, plundering may be an act of resistance, but there is lit-
tle doubt that this resistance has changed form, if not substance, over the past
few years. The purpose is no longer to do battle with markets and companies
construed as core institutions, but to play around with the markets even as
one plays them. This means that confrontation per se is not an essential activity.
“We don’t need to ask ourselves whether we are free or enslaved . . . since we
become completely free once we experience freedom” (Aubenas and Benasayag,
2002, p. 74). In the play spaces of ESPN Zone Chicago, Kozinets et al. (2004,
p. 671), found that “the wills of consumers and producers tend to be far more
overlapping, mutual, and interdependent than commonly recognized.”
In other words, plundering is less and less of a conscious, revolutionary
countercultural action, and more of an aestheticization of the daily experi-
ences (see Featherstone, 1991). Consumers hijack commercial reality when
they work in a group and with relative unawareness of exactly what they
are doing, devising a zone of ephemeral and limited autonomy inside of the
market system (Desmond, Mc Donagh, and O’Donohue, 2000). It is a stylistic

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 16 Consumer Tribes

move. In the commercial interstices of temporary autonomous zones (Bey,

1991) and in hypercommunities (Kozinets, 2002a), what is created is not only
community, meaning, or matter, but also pop vox, bleeding edge, lead user
style, and fashion: art.
For Alex Wipperfürth (2005), this “brand hijack” occurs when a group of
consumers takes a brand away from its marketing professionals in an attempt
to enhance its further development. Such brand hijack phenomena are accen-
tuated when interactions with the brand tribe occur on-line (Kozinets, 2002b;
O’Guinn and Muniz, 2005). Recent research has highlighted many problems
a company can have when interacting with this kind of hard-to-control col-
lective actor whom the net has spontaneously helped to foster and nurture
(Broderick, MacLaran, and Ma, 2003). On-line consumers would appear to be
more active, participative, resistant, militant, playful, social and communitar-
ian than ever before (Kozinets, 1999). They want to be influential participants
in the construction of experiences (Firat and Shultz, 1997). The shared passion
that certain consumers have for a cult brand will translate, through a range
of collective learning systems, into expertise and competency, imbuing on-line
tribes with greater legitimacy in production and marketing matters (O’Guinn
and Muniz, 2005). As a result, companies are finding in this era of collective
intelligence that they have to adjust to the presence of tribes comprised of
impassioned, united and expert fans. Because of technology, there is a
re-balancing of company–consumer power relations occurring on a massive
scale, one that has only just begun and some of whose implications we explore
further in our next section.

Consumer Tribes Are Entrepreneurs

When we look at a particular act of brand plunder, the re-balancing of power
between tribes and companies constitutes little more than a passing phenom-
enon. It would be easy (and it is easy) to exaggerate the importance of single
instances of plunder. But the evidence points to a more dynamic view. Plunder
transpires as part of a Consumer Tribe movement that is itself in the midst
of a broader process of development. Tribes are poised to become collective
actors in the marketplace, much in the same that way that companies already
are. The marketing competencies of Tribes will soon rival those of companies.
Indeed, just as Napster once looked like the Grim Reaper for a bloated and
rapacious music industry, so too should the thought of Harry Potter fans
making and sharing their own games, or Star Trek fans producing their own
television shows and broadcasting them to the world through the Internet
send a chill down every media executive’s spine. In other words, we are
already at the point where marketing is no longer the reserved domain of
companies and corporations, but a set of practices, accesses, codes, and rituals
that are available to all communities: this is the re-emergence of marketing “as
the empowering “tool” of the post-consumer (and) would tend to re-establish
democracy in a form that is viable – based on the constitution of post-consumer

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 17

communities or tribes” (Firat and Dholakia, 2004, p. 27; see also Gabriel and
Lang, 1995).
Anders Bengtsson, Jacob Östberg and Dannie Kjeldgaard (2005) provide
us with a fascinating case study of subcultural resistance. Their videogra-
phy and ethnography show how a subculture resists tattooing’s commercial-
ization by detailing tribe members’ and artists’ perception that a boundary
exists between the sacred, non-commercial sphere of tattooing and the pro-
fane, profit-maximizing realm of the commercial world. What we see at work
here is a type of resistance that manifests through limiting the community’s
entrepreneurial capabilities. By limiting their own commercial capacities, they
try to ensure the continued authenticity of a production that is supposed to
remain pristine and not be subverted by any contact with the market (hence
with the dominant cultural and economic system). Interestingly, the same
debate is happening among hobbyist, consumer bloggers, like the Barq’s Man.
Here is what the Barq’s Man (aka “Michael Marx”) says about being paid to
promote a brand through his blog:

I continue to blog about Barq’s simply because I love the brand, I

love the product, and I’d love to see the world drinking Barq’s. You
couldn’t pay me to do it. If you did, I would lose my independence
and independence is the best part of blogging. On the other hand,
isn’t getting paid to do what you love something that people aspire
to? What about all those people who have monetized their hobbies?
World class chefs, adventure tour guides, professional athletes? Is it
still fun for them? Or is it more about the money? This issue can be
argued both ways, but I do believe that where there is money, there
is obligation. And with obligation independence is reigned in. And in
the case of this Barq’s blog, the fun is in the freedom.
(Source: http://www.thebarqsman.com/, downloaded 9/13/2006)

The key to decoding these accounts is the romanticized and mysticized, yet
culturally resonant assertion that, just as communities and markets do not
mix, authenticity belongs to practices and personalities that are on the mar-
gins or as close to the outside of the market as possible. As Luc Boltanski and
Eve Chiapello have shown (2006), if it is to regenerate itself, capitalism must
look outside of the commercial sphere for the layers of authenticity in which it
will be wrapping its product offerings.
As the ambivalence in the Barq Man’s quote attests, however, today’s tribal
reality is much more complex. As Bruno Latour writes (1991, p. 167) “In the
middle, where there is supposed to be nothing, you find almost everything”.
Between markets and communities is much hybridization. Collective tribes
are increasingly capable of collective action and prepared to interact with the
market in a way that is more and more entrepreneurial. Indeed, as recently
discussed by Thomas O’Guinn and Albert Muniz (2005), one key element
in today’s tribe-market interactions is that companies can lose part of their

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 18 Consumer Tribes

control over a brand, to be replaced by a Consumer Tribe that is trying to

re-appropriate it. Alternatively, as Christina Goulding and Mike Saren high-
light in this volume, Goth tribes form their own markets and engage with each
other in the production and consumption of good and services. Here the mar-
ket transactions are marked by tribal affiliation and the reconnection of “pro-
ducers” and “consumers,” the very antithesis of globalized, corporatized and
socially distanced relationships that characterize many market relationships. In
Roy Langer’s chapter on the Fetish community in Denmark, he also highlights
the entrepreneurial activities of its members. The on-going tension between
sub- and mainstream culture is highlighted and the ensuing problems and
challenges that this creates for the tribal marketer is identified, as they seek to
maintain boundaries of distinctiveness between tribal and mass marketing.
The engagements tribal members have with one another can be marked by
conflict. Kristine de Valck’s chapter in this book examines the contested mean-
ings and practices of members of a food consumption on-line community.
The on-line war of an e-tribe underscores that the apparent tribal uniformity
of a differentiated group can cloak brewing conflict and disagreement within
the tribal fabric itself. We see conflict and differentiation in other tribal set-
tings. The devoted Hummer tribe explored in Marius Lüdicke’s and Markus
Giesler’s insightful chapter is in a perpetual state of conflict with the main-
stream. Constantly seeking new justifications for the basis of their brand iden-
tification, the members of the Hummer tribe reveal the potent pressures that
brand tribe members can never completely avoid, and the discursive strat-
egies that they must adapt and adopt.
Let’s add to these examples by exploring two clear-cut and demonstrative
cases of tribal entrepreneurship that are characterized by different gradations
of this phenomenon. Consider first The Paris Roller Case. This example is
based on the interaction between roller skater tribes and companies/brands
in France, as explained by Boris Belohlavek, VP of Paris Roller, an associ-
ation created by roller skating fans in 1998 to manage and supervise Friday
night mass skate tours in Paris, some of which have witnessed as many as
25,000 persons skating from one end of the city to the other. Belohlavek feels
that “Brands have a role to play in the tour but must be entirely under the
Association’s control”.
It is critical to note that these tours grew organically from the streets; they
are not the product of someone’s calculated initiative but simply reflect the
libertarian wishes of a few skaters for a new way of enjoying their city. As
the tours grew in size, companies and their brands began to take an interest
and tried to sponsor the tours. This of course is the traditional co-optational
marketing approach. But it didn’t work. Remember the Barq man’s comment,
that “if you pay me, I would lose my independence”? Tribe members were
very quick to understand that for the tour to retain its cultural purity they
would have to develop certain competencies not only to resist the companies
and brands but also to co-operate with them based on sets of rules that were
defined by the tribe itself and not by the business world. This was a remark-
able undertaking to witness. The community said no to sponsors, and then

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 19

told them what it would take for them to say yes. What Robert Kozinets (1999,
p. 258) said about e-tribes applies equally well to all tribes: the existence of
groups of united consumers “implies that power is shifting away from mar-
keters and flowing to consumers”, as consumers are increasingly saying “ ‘no’
to forms of marketing they find invasive or unethical.”
As a result, the roller skating tribe mutated from a group of fans organized
on an associative basis into a tribal enterprise capable of engaging in dialogue
and even forcing companies and brands to accept its ideas and perspective.
As Boris Belohlavek says, “It is much easier (for a firm or a brand) to speak to
a tribe when it feels respected, as this makes it natural to want to return the
favour”. To help firms’ in-house marketers, who are more accustomed to act-
ing upon segments than to tribal interactions, Paris Roller wrote the following
rules to govern companies/brands’ tribal marketing approaches:

! Skaters should be respected for who they are.

! The understanding is that a skating tour is very different from the commer-
cial ventures associated with cycling’s Tour de France.
! Skaters must not be viewed as traditional marketing targets.
! Nothing may be sold during the actual skate tour.
! The distribution of flyers by themselves is discouraged.
! Excessive branding is prohibited. The ability to host any partners will
belong to the Association, whose predominance must remain visible.
! Resources should be offered to skaters (samples, free games) and to the
Association (funding, membership privileges, materials, etc.).

According to Boris Belohlavek, “Respect for the tribe’s independence helps

partners to discover that less basic marketing solutions are in fact a possibil-
ity.” Of course, any such solutions require the modification of certain rules,
with the Association transferring its tribal marketing competencies to firms
that are severely lacking in them.
Mozilla Firefox provides a second case. In the world of OSS (Open Source
Software), it is widely recognized that collective effort, social interaction and
group influence are all crucial to the development and use of software like
Linux. Tribal volunteering is very important for this kind of enterprise: “OSS
projects not only entail unpaid contributions of code by developers, but also
unpaid assistance and advocacy by existing volunteer users to enlist and help
new users” (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006, p. 1100). This phenomenon of volun-
teering has provided a basis for the development of tribal initiatives that, from
the very outset, act upon the market by operating outside of the borders of a
reduced community.
Mozilla Firefox is a case where individual consumers become tribe members
and subsequently become marketing agents trying to use the net’s power to
attain certain marketing goals (Krishnamurty, 2005a). Firefox’s success derives
from 63,000 volunteers having spread the word by putting up links to the
main download site (including in their email signature file), discussing Firefox
in blogs, posting its icon to their personal websites, collecting testimonials

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 20 Consumer Tribes

and visiting technical sites where they vote for their favourite browser. In
addition, over 10,000 volunteers donated $30 each to help launch a full-page
advertisement in the New York Times. Krishnamurty (2005b) identifies the cen-
tral tenet for this type of tribal entrepreneurship as the idea that consumers
should be exerting their power in the marketplace through constructive and
not destructive collective action, with the Consumer Tribe producing, market-
ing and servicing an offer that competes favourably with corporate products
in the marketplace.
In both examples (Paris Roller and Mozilla Firefox) as in many others, we
see how a tribe is no longer trying to resist economic actors or the market
but instead has itself become a legitimate economic actor in its marketplace,
without losing any of its communitarian nature or forms. In particular, note
that these tribes’ tribal knowledge has given them a significant competitive
advantage over their corporate rivals (Moore, 2006). This is clearly not
your mother’s tribalism: bones in the hair and sacred drum circles. Modern
primitivism is primal partnership, tribal trading, collective capitalism.
Stephen Brown’s Harry Potter tribes are acting as entrepreneurs and inventors,
as are the inno-tribes of Robert Kozinets’ new Star Trek episode film-makers and
webcasts. In fact, the fan-film-makers that Kozinets wrote about recently posted
a message on their web-page stating that “It is our dream that CBS/Paramount
will someday license and/or support these fan films” (Cawley Entertainment
Company, 2006). In other words, we are a Consumer Tribe but we want our
work to be licensed: share the wealth, profit from us, help us make money from
this. What could be more entrepreneurial? We believe that these examples are
the crest of the Consumer Tribal Wave, harbingers of things to come.
A kind of social entrepreneurship is evident in Isabelle Smizgin, Marylyn
Carrigan and Caroline Bekin’s look at how New Consumption Communities
create alternative market ethics that facilitate alternative producer–market–
consumer relationships thus ameliorating their reliance on what they see as
repressive market ethics. The Tribes examined in this chapter view their activ-
ities not as resistance to mainstream production and exchange, but as posi-
tive alternatives that can complement and have a positive impact on society
and exchange relations. Stefano Pace, Luciano Fratocchi and Fabrizio Cocciola
highlight the passion of a craftsman of fine briar smoking pipes, a more typic-
ally entrepreneurial individual who shares ideas and emotions with other
individuals with the same interest thus forming a tribe. From this sharing and
this participation stem entrepreneurial and mutually beneficial commercial
transactions that transpire at an international level. Throughout these chapters
and examples, the entrepreneurial spirit of Consumer Tribes shines through.

Conclusion: Tribes Are Open, Aporic, and Incorporated

Once upon a time, tribal knowledge was innate, usually unwritten, spoken
only with a dedicated group of people. It was tantamount to an informal vari-
ant of group wisdom. As a term, “tribal knowledge” is now used mostly in

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 21

management circles when referencing information that other parties operating

within a company may need to know. Unlike similar forms of artisan intel-
ligence, tribal knowledge can be converted, albeit with some difficulty, into
company property, as demonstrated by John Moore (2006) when he describes
the thought process underlying decision-making at Starbucks.
However, whereas companies are working desperately to develop this type
of knowledge, and often deploying ideas adapted form chaos theory to do so,
the natural chaos of tribal groups of consumers seem de facto able to renew it
quite effortlessly among their members. Tribes work differently: individuals
enter social and economic relations knowing ex ante that giving–receiving is
not dictated by some governing body, and that it can not be weighted using
the usual rational methods. For example, the (economic) value of coordinat-
ing or being part of a tribe is based on perceptions, feelings and emotions –
beneath the actual output of the tribe and its perceived value from each mem-
ber. As word of mouth marketers are discovering, this calls for a complex
set of inducements and understandings of cause–effect relations. Consumer
Tribes are different: rather than offer “a new form of organization” they are
offering a new way of thinking about the problems of organizing.
In their radical departure, Consumer Tribes offer a viable solution to man-
age the duality between individuals and organizations. This gives them an
undeniable advantage over companies, one they no longer use to simply resist
the market but instead to play within and with it. Where once tribes were seen
as transformative to their members, we are beginning to see how they are
transformative to business and communicative practices and to society itself.
What is required to meet the challenge is a true shift in the underpinnings
of marketing. The marketing “revolution” is a term often debased by its appli-
cation to insignificant changes in this field. “KYC” (knowing your customer)
may be a crucial concept in marketing, but it is often given the restricted
and manipulative denotation that marketers need to know absolutely every-
thing about consumers to satisfy them and secure their loyalty. Seldom has
the idea been proposed in marketing that consumers possess organizational
knowledge that may be of interest to the management and strategizing of the
company. We, however, are of the opinion that in the future companies will
be obliged to incorporate other perspectives, like those put forward by con-
sumers assembled alongside other consumers into tribes. The goal here will not
be to exploit these Consumer Tribes but instead to see them as partners who
can teach a kind of expertise and experience. That will require major advances
in management and in the current climate may be impossible for many firms.
Another necessary shift is to understand that, contrary to received wisdom
in marketing, companies do not need to send totally coherent messages to
the marketplace. Consumers fill in the blanks, and they often do a better job
of colouring in the picture than marketers would do. Recent studies (Giraud
Voss, 2003) have even shown how positive it can be when gaps exist between
a company’s identity and the image it projects in the marketplace. Such gaps
offer consumers more margin for freedom, giving them greater room to
manœuvre around the company and its brand. Similarly, consumers seem to

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 22 Consumer Tribes

prefer an ambiguous corporate image to one that is clear-cut (Giraud Voss,

2003). This creates room for a host of initiatives involving re-enchantment
with consumption as well as hyper-reality – consumers do not automatically
need or want everything to be true and coherent. As Stephen Brown (e.g.,
Brown, 2001) and his patron saint P.T. Barnum are endlessly reminding us, the
so-called rational consumer has an insatiable hunger for reverie, mystery, and
fantasy.
There is a magic here, a magic that rises in aporia, in the void of com-
mercial pauses and stutters. We find consumers, in the moments when the
brand pauses to inhale, breathing their life into it. And the collective breath
is much more powerful. These inhalations draw us back to the market’s ori-
gins. Anthropologist and archaeologists tell us that the early marketplace
was “marked out” as a boundary space, a line on the edge of forest, a place
delimited in time and space on the edge where woods met dwellings met
cities. The early market was an eldritch space of intrigue, shot through with
more than a touch of dark trickery, of fetid and desirous potential hanging
tightly coiled, ready to spring for good or ill. On those strange limbs, laden
with the strange items and practices of the other, magic hung, an enchanting
mystique that still inheres in the current consumer marketplace.
But after a century of Taylorized scientific management clouding the under-
standing of marketing as magic, the market’s true workings have become
cloaked beneath veneers of science and rationality. Today’s consumers are not
in the market because they want to feel that they are buying something mass
produced, confirming conformist longing, commercial. They do not want to
hear some CEO tell them how the market economy should run their lives. We
need to cast a spotlight on situations where consumers adore a cult brand but
hate the company that developed it because the firm lacked commercial taste,
such as the fans of Star Wars who reject and despise George Lucas (Brown et al.,
2003), or the followers of the Newton who reject Apple (Muniz and Schau,
2005). Some consumers’ shared passion for a brand can translate into a feeling
of marketing legitimacy. They see themselves as guardians of a brand’s authen-
ticity and are unhappy when the firm organizes an overtly commercial hijack
(notably where this is product related). They prefer, we would argue, a good
plunder over a boring old hijack any day. Lucasfilm’s treatment of the Star
Wars series was criticized by fans for being overly commercial (Brown et al.,
2003; Cova and Carrère, 2002). Instead, hordes of pillaging fans produced their
own Star Wars films, lots of them, as digital cinematographers (Jenkins, 2003).
Michel Maffesoli’s chapter in this book centres upon a type of mindful,
in the present moment consumption style, which he likens to “an eternal
paganism”. The comparison is revealing and important, as magical thinking
seems to lie at the heart of many of these phenomena. The most potent tribes,
as Alex Wipperfürth (2005), Douglas Atkins (2004), and Kevin Roberts (2004)
and other pop philosophers of the brand assert, are built in the interstices, in
the margins, on the fringes. But these pop practitioners, locked into patterns
of exploiting segments of consumers, have not yet begin to plumb the depths
of the commercial commingling.

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 Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism 23

Why does tribal work occur on the fringe? Why does it grow, barnacle-
like, around abandoned Apple Newton and deserted Star Trek brands, within
semi-marginal gatherings of time has passed musical celebrities like Cliff
Richards and Tom Petty, in the gaps of the outlaw Harley myth, among stig-
matized Hummer drivers? What is it about these brands and products that
draw tribal meanings to them like cat hair to an acrylic white sweater? Beyond
simplistic notions of meaning creation and local authenticity, what is the rela-
tionship between magic and the tribe?
We invite you, Gentle Readers and Web-Surfers, to begin your own specu-
lation and investigations. Read this book. Look around. Hang out. Use your
browser. Use Google groups. Watch television. Go to the mall. Consumer
Tribes will welcome you. They await you without limit.

References
Atkins, D. (2004), The Culting of Brands. Turn Your Customers into True Believers.
New York: Portfolio.
Aubenas, F. and Benasayag, M. (2002), Résister c’est créer. Paris: La Découverte.
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 Author queries

AQ1 Please note that Grayson (1998) has not been given in the reference
list.
AQ2 Please confirm the change of 8º6 to 8.6.
AQ3 Please check the term “inno-tribes”.
AQ4 Please check the term “a’movin’ ”.
AQ5 Please note that “Cova and Pace (2006)”, “Fortin (2005)” and
“Kozinets (2001)” have not been cross-referred in the text.

CH001.indd 27 3/28/07 12:04:51 PM

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