This paper explores the processes contributing to the genesis of a brand community. This ethnographic study focuses on the Beamish brand community. The Beamish beer product is a niche brand only available consistently in the locality of Cork city, Ireland. Evidence from this study shows that a collective conversion experience is foundational to the emergence of this brand community. Following this initial conversion experience, the brand community attempts to maintain the transcendent experience through practices of sacralisation maintenance. Sacralisation is maintained through the playful rituals and virtual play the community members enact. The mutual willingness of the converted to participate in these various forms of playful rituals has been a key role in the reification of the Beamish brand community. Finally, suggestions are made as to how brand management should best approach the initial attempts at brand-community formation.Brendan Richardson is a lecturer in marketing and consumer behaviour in the Department of Management and Marketing, UCC, Cork, Ireland. His research interests are primarily in collective forms of consumer behaviour such as football fandom and brand communities, but he is also interested in the motivation to participate in blogging and high-risk consumer activities such as kayaking and surfing. Related areas of interest include sacred consumption, consumer resistance, subcultures of consumption, and the further development of ethnography as a research methodology.T +35321490294

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Contemporary culture is characterized by individual and societal efforts to limit exposure to risk. Paradoxically, many consumers actively pursue high-risk consumption experiences. High-risk consumption, coupled with a lack of consumption-orientated information, amplifies consumer vulnerability. However, consumer-to-consumer information sharing can help reduce unwarranted risk and enhance consumption context control. This study investigates the ecstasy "market maven crowd": an online community anonymously bound by acts of collective market mavenism intended to address the void of market information and reduce the risks thereof. Acts of collective market mavenism include the assimilation and dissemination of scientific ecstasy pill content reports and personal ecstasy consumption tales. The diffusion of market-orientated information provides consumers with an opportunity to identify, and avert, the serious health risks intrinsic to ecstasy consumption and assert consumption context control. Collaborative market mavenism fosters market policing, which enhances the safety structures of the unregulated ecstasy market. This study contributes to marketing and consumer research by developing an understanding of how consumers collectively adapt to risk online; displaying market mavenism as an innovative framework to examine online consumer-to-consumer information sharing; showing how Internet technologies facilitate the emergence of market maven crowds; and providing marketers with guidelines for approaching market maven crowds. Finally, the author discusses the societal implications arising and suggests directions for future research. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Advances in technology are providing increasing opportunities for consumers to interact and relay a range of practical market-orientated information (

Play theory has been underutilized to understand consumer behaviour. In this article, we adopt a play theory perspective to understand how consumers respond to and navigate macrostructural influences. The marketplace culture stream of consumer culture theory (CCT) research is particularly well suited to macrostructural analysis from a play theory perspective. We develop an analytical framework derived from play theory to interpret the context of marketplace culture. We show how the types of play foundational to marketplace culture experiences act as expressions of order or disorder to wider macrostructural influences. In contrast to agentic perspectives, we show how marketplace culture experiences, despite their fun appearance, embody the underlying tensions of the intensifying rationality, regulation and competition structuring neoliberal society. Finally, we express concern over the marketer’s control of playground expression and suggest CCT adopt a more critical stance to the commercialization of play.

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