Consumer roles in brand culture and value co-creation in virtual communities

Using a Netnographic Grounded Theory approach to an online fan forum, a Virtual Community (VC), this article considers brand culture and value co-creation. The research site is a VC containing football fans who are viewed as stakeholders of the organisation Liverpool Football Club. Following a service-dominant logic (SDL) and consumer culture theory (CCT) approaches, analysis is conducted on fan consumer behaviour leading to the submission of a Typology of Seven Consumer Community Cultural Co-creative Roles. The authors reflect on existing theoretical consumer responses to market offerings of exit, voice, loyalty, and twist, found in extant literature, adopting these as four co-creative roles. This study contributes three new consumer co-creative roles of entry, re-entry, and non-entry. Managerial implications of the typology are discussed. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.