Marketing’s Interpretive Communities: a New Form of Sociocultural Segmentation?

Interpretation of brands and marketing communications has become increasingly problematic in the contemporary commercial environment, largely due to an overabundance of available cultural meanings and interpretive perspectives, and the instability of social categories. This problem has implications for segmentation and the positioning of brands, and for the strategic consistency of marketing messages. In response to this question, this article adopts a reader-response perspective. The purposes here are the following: to advance the theoretical constructs of interpretive communities and interpretive strategies; to present conceptual issues relating to doing brand or subcultural ethnographies in consumer research; and to demonstrate the usefulness and relevance of interpretive communities and strategies to the theory and practice of marketing.