Brand communities offer the promise of a marketing program that is synergistic with the intrinsic motivations, interests, and empowerment of contemporary consumers. Widely applicable and increasingly used by mainstream consumers across a range of product and service categories, they represent avenues for marketers to generate a range of positive outcomes for the firm in cost-effective ways. For consumer researchers, brand communities are venues to study a host of psychological and social issues. In this article, we elaborate on this concept by providing a definition of brand community, introduce and elaborate on different types of brand communities, and examine the consequences of consumer participation in them.