Non Commercial B2c Virtual Communities: Definition and Classification an Exploratory Qualitative Study

This paper highlights some confusion in the marketing literature concerning virtual communities of consumers which are initiated by companies in their web sites. Some researches in Marketing tend, indeed, to design any community within the official Website of the brand as a B2C virtual brand community. However, the paper notes that the passion to the brand, which is an essential characteristic of a brand community, is not usually the common point that gathers net surfers in the brands web sites. Through a participating observation, this article tries, therefore, to bring some clarification on B2C virtual communities by proposing them a definition and a typology. The latter rests on the central object of the community like on its orientation. The qualitative empirical results stress the different forms of B2C virtual communities and note that virtual brand communities are just one form of them. The paper finishes by an evaluation of the proposed typology according to the five criteria of Hunt (1991).