Purpose

Online brand communities provide a wealth of insights about how consumers perceive and talk about a brand, rather than what the firm communicates about the brand. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the brand personality of an online brand community, rather than of the brand itself, can be deduced from the online communication within that brand community.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is empirical in nature. The authors use community-generated content from eight online brand communities and perform content analysis using the text analysis software Diction. The authors employ the five brand personality dictionaries (competence, excitement, ruggedness, sincerity and sophistication) from the Pitt et al. (2007) dictionary source as the basis for the authors’ analysis.

Findings

The paper offers two main contributions. First, it identifies two types of communities: those focusing on solving functional problems that consumers might encounter with a firm’s offering and those focusing on broader engagement with the brand. Second, the study serves as a blueprint that marketers can adopt to analyze online brand communities using a computerized approach. Such a blueprint is beneficial not only to analyze a firm’s own online brand community but also that of competitors, thus providing insights into how their brand stacks up against competitor brands.

Originality/value

This is the first paper examining the nature of online brand communities by means of computerized content analysis. The authors outline a number of areas that marketing scholars could explore further based on the authors analysis. The paper also highlights implications for marketers when establishing, managing, monitoring and analyzing online brand communities