Managing Consumption Communities - The Supplier Perspective

Abstract

Communal consumption has lately received abundant research attention. Nevertheless, consumption community management has not been studied very widely in the discipline of marketing. In particular, there are very few community management studies that examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the community supplier. Because the present study adopts this scantily studied perspective, it employs an abductive research approach. In order to give much emphasis on the empirical data, the researcher did not use any specific preselected theoretical framework to classify the findings. However, existing consumption community literature was broadly examined to create preliminary understanding, to provide theoretical background information and to support the researcher's interpretation.

The previous community management theory often underlines how difficult, if not impossible, it is to control communities consisting of autonomous actors. Despite this, suppliers cannot settle for the role of a passive onlooker. Since consumption communities can provide substantial commercial and even strategic benefits to suppliers, suppliers must find alternative ways to manage those communities. Therefore, this study aims to specify the role of the supplier in the consumption community as well as analyze how the consumption communities can actually be managed. In this study, consumption communities are seen as heterogeneous social networks that express communality in manifold ways. Altogether five representatives of three successful community suppliers were interviewed. In addition to the depth interviews, a post-review seminar was organized to enrich the empirical data. In the post-review seminar six experts of community management discussed the findings of the analysis in order to verify and enhance researcher's interpretation.

Based on the major findings, a framework for consumption community management from the supplier perspective was created. First, the framework summarizes the role of the supplier. Both previous literature and the empirical findings indicate that in the consumption community the role of the supplier is above all a facilitator. This research indicates that the supplier that operates in this facilitative role can manage consumption communities by implementing twelve actions that can be further divided into six action categories. Due to its data driven nature the formed framework provides both theoretical contribution and managerial implications.