Rethinking the brand–community relationship: Wearing a biggie in Harlem

Introduction

In this article, I examine how youth in Harlem reworked the branding of an expensive down parka made by Marmot, an outdoor clothing company based in California, and sold and authenticated at Paragon Sports in downtown Manhattan. Teenagers in Harlem renamed the Marmot Mammoth a “biggie” and used the coat, its solid colors or “flavors,” and other product marks to organize friendships, rivalries, and dating intimacies in the physical and digital space of the neighborhood. My fieldwork suggests two broad findings. The first is that a brand is basically a social affordance reworked with new meanings implanted at the local level by face-to-face groups. And second, individuals use branded products as inputs into themselves as personal brands. These findings reorient the defining processes of brand mediation in the context of the urban neighborhood. In 2001, Muñiz and O’Guinn argued that aspects of community traditionally found in urban neighborhoods played out among consumers loyal to the same brand. Brand scholars have since assumed that brands are communities (Stratton and Northcote, 2016). Here, I walk back this assumption to demonstrate that community mediates the brand in the context of on- and offline street life. Before laying out the ethnography, I look more closely at Muñiz and O’Guinn’s study and provide an alternative pivot point in the urban literature.

Locating community in the brand

Muñiz and O’Guinn introduced the term “brand community” in a short conference paper given in 1995 and a full-length study in 2001. Their study was especially innovative because it combined ethnographic observations of physical locations, local meet-ups such as a Saab dealership, and digital locations, over 50 personal websites maintained by admirers of the Saab brand as well as Ford Bronco and Macintosh. By imagining their field of study broadly, they discovered “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand” (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001: 412). Fifteen years later, Stratton and Northcote (2016) published a typology of brand communities from the vast literature of such cases of “when totems beget clans.” Muñiz and O’Quinn showed that, as in face-to-face, place-based communities, brand communities (1) develop a shared consciousness of kind, becoming a “we” in opposition to disingenuous brand followers or loyalists of competing brands; (2) become socialized into the unique culture and history of the brand through rituals and traditions; and (3) exercise moral responsibility for their brand by taking it upon themselves to educate others in the proper meaning and uses of branded products and to attract and retain brand community members.

Muñiz and O’Guinn found that personal websites gave consumers a platform to express and share their passion and expertise with other brand admirers anywhere. As social media pages supplanted personal websites, brand research continued in the vein of imagined community (Anderson, 1983) liberated from geography and place-based social life. The next wave of scholars located brand communities on social media (e.g. Adjei et al., 2010; Thompson and Sinha, 2008; Zaglia, 2013) and other digital technology (such as Dwyer, 2007), often using brand-related communication to identify and examine community.

By 2007, “Brand Community” had become one of the world’s most cited papers in business and economics, according to Thomson Scientific. When asked to assess their study’s impact, Muñiz and O’Guinn said in a joint statement: “Our work demonstrates that humans, as social beings, find and create community where they will. Sometimes, they will find it around a branded good” (Press release, 2007). In 2001, Muñiz and O’Guinn were responding to “cultural criticism [that] … lamented the loss of community associated with modernity.”

Muñiz and O’Guinn argued that brand consumption provided a foundation for community not unlike an urban neighborhood. They based this claim on classic urban research that argued that neighbors typically share thin connections. Jannowitz (1952) and later Hunter and Suttles (1972) developed the concept of “limited liability” to explain that residents of the same urban neighborhood often maintained few ties beyond broad common interests, such as getting more resources from the city. Muñiz and O’Guinn saw a parallel in the way consumers bonded over certain branded products and differentiated themselves from consumers loyal to competing products with how urban residents based group identities on their most obvious similarities and differences with their neighbors (Hunter and Suttles, 1972).

My fieldwork suggested an alternative pivot. Rather than an analogy between urban and brand communities, street life actually implants a brand with meaning in the neighborhood. Hunter and Suttles also addressed turf systems in poor, segregated areas where group identities based on home address and outward appearance shape access to public space and resources and friendships, rivalries, and dating among youth (Hunter and Suttles, 1972; Suttles, 1968). A contentious social geography infuses consumer brands with street-level significance.

The street code and consumption

Suttles trained Elijah Anderson, a prominent urban sociologist, who explained neighborhood conflict in terms of the “code of the street.” The code revolves around a contest for respect in urban areas with racialized poverty. Youth are expected to fight to uphold their reputation as well as the safety and honor of their friend group and micro-neighborhood. The publication of Code of the Street (Anderson, 1999) spawned a variety of ethnographic research in poor neighborhoods, including work by Anderson’s student Nikki Jones. Jones (2010) found that three Rs of the street code – reputation, respect, and retaliation – structured the social world of boys and girls. In recent decades, Jones explained, the survival lessons Black girls learned in the face of racism and sexism now included physical threats from other Black girls.

Scholars who have written about consumption among African American youth have discussed the use of high-status items, particularly clothing, to counter visible associations with poverty (MacLeod, 1995; Nightingale, 1993). Nightingale (1993) argues that youth investments in expensive and stylish goods not only help “to overcome economic and racial humiliation but also to help define their femininity and masculinity” (p. 164).

In the context of racialized poverty, youth consumption interacts with violence and the street code. Some research finds that consumption may play a protective function in neighborhood violence. Pugh (2009: 145) found that parents with limited funds bought “big-ticket” gifts – best of all video games – “that kept children inside and happy” and thus safe. But other research implicates consumer goods in the process of neighborhood violence. Certain branded goods operate as claims on local social space that peers affirm or dispute. The jockeying for respect Anderson (1999) writes about becomes visible through “trophies” or items that once belonged to someone else: “Possessing the trophy can symbolize the ability to violate somebody … to enhance one’s own worth by stealing someone else’s” (p. 75). Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada (1995), one of the most influential adults in urban education and locally in the lives of Harlem youth, wrote about the street code in his memoir. Canada described his own childhood socialization into neighborhood violence that began when a boy took his jacket in the park and his mother insisted he confront the boy to get it back.

Pattillo-McCoy (1999) examined the importance of branded consumer goods within peer contexts that encompass youth gangs (p. 166). For African American youth in Chicago, brands are “symbols that matter for courtship, for self-esteem, for aesthetic enjoyment, for gang affiliation, and for distinction-making.” These symbols are part of a “material dialogue” between friends and enemies in the neighborhood (Pattillo-McCoy, 1999: 146). Here, the focus on brands rather than simply goods or consumption is important. The Chicago teenagers that Pattillo-McCoy studied gave colors, logos, names, and other product branding new meanings based on peer relationships in contentious urban space.

In urban neighborhoods with entrenched violence and poverty, and low levels of police trust, the fear and tension youth experience in their surroundings get expressed through a brand. As youth use branded products to establish and test their claims on each other and on neighborhood space, the adult world also engages in the evaluation of local youth. In the public space of the neighborhood, including now its extensions online, a labeling process (Chambliss, 1973; Lemert, 1951) unfolds as youth self-identify and/or become identified by their peers, neighborhood adults, outreach workers, teachers, police, prosecutors, and others as street- or gang-involved (Anderson, 1999; Dance, 2002; Jones, 2010; Rios, 2017). The consequences of being labeled as “street” are shown to be lasting and compounding across multiple spheres of institutional life (Jones, 2010; Rios, 2017). Part of this stratification turns on the brands African American and Latino teenagers wear and even how they wear branded items. In gentrifying locations like Harlem, the labeling of youth and the criminal legal actions that may follow (e.g. gang indictments or injunctions) may shape the use of public space, residential turnover, and financial investments in the area moving forward.

On the marketing side, urban neighborhoods are also important sites to examine brand meaning because marketing specialists may mine these settings for youth appropriations to remarket more broadly (Gladwell, 1997; Goldman and Papson, 1996). In other words, African American and Latino youth in urban contexts may signal what is “cool” for consumers elsewhere.

In the analysis that follows, I show how teenagers in Harlem rebranded Marmot in terms of the risks they faced in their neighborhood and how this labeling process played out in the community and for the brand. I first need to describe my fieldwork and Marmot’s original image.

Fieldwork in Harlem

Data for this analysis are drawn primarily from fieldwork (343 fieldnote entries and 37 recorded interviews) completed in Harlem between November 2009 and August 2012. I did not begin my study with an interest in brands, but the social importance of Marmot biggies emerged almost immediately while doing volunteer youth outreach work. Starting in the fall of 2009, as a doctoral student, I became a participant-observer in an anti-violence ministry led by an ordained minister and ex-offender known simply as “Pastor.” I entered the field as a White man in my early 30s and my sponsor, Pastor, was a Black man in his early 50s. Over time, I became deeply involved in all aspects of Pastor’s operation, starting with meeting youth on the street, especially during afterschool hours and Friday and Saturday nights when teens traveled to and from parties, and monitoring social media. I participated in “interrupting” confrontations and fights and subsequent peace talks (efforts that diffused violence in some cases and failed in others); coordinating rallies, vigils, and “Positive Presence 4 Peace” Fridays (3-hour street-corner conversations with local entertainment acts and program referrals); and providing assistance to youth with school, work, and the court system. I also started a computer lab (“The Lab”) in Pastor’s office, a drop-in space for youth.

I lived in the neighborhood I studied for nearly 5 years and I took on other roles in the community. I served as a workshop leader at a major municipal summer employment program for three summers, consultant at a public defender office representing teens and young adults, and member of a government-funded juvenile gang task force that included police and representatives of other city agencies.

I came to meet hundreds and hundreds of teenagers and young adults and some of their parents and the other adults and institutional actors in their lives. The youth I studied were people of color, predominantly children of African American parents and some whose parents recently immigrated, including from the West Indies, West Africa, Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic. I observed variation in home and family arrangements (though two-parent households were rare); access to basic provisions, schooling, and work experience; and type and extent of involvements in the court systems. But the nature of my immersion steered me toward the fraction of young people involved in the social life of the street. This means the data discussed emphasize the perspective of youth already identified by Pastor and outreach workers and by police as street- or gang-involved as opposed to the majority of youth in the community with primary peer social lives situated in school and elsewhere and for whom visible associations to street-involved youth included through branded clothing may transfer surveillance, stigma, and danger.

During fieldwork, I often spent many hours each day on certain blocks, especially 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, a block and a half from my apartment. When I brought my car around, it became a place to hang out or a shuttle for kids and their family members. I not only benefited from a routine established before I arrived by Pastor and his collaborators but also developed my own identity and relationships apart from Pastor and the outreach work. Playing basketball with many of the boys from the group on the corner of 129th Street helped me to achieve that independence. We played in games at a local community center, at a church, and outdoors. Having grown up in New York City, I had leads on multiple games in Manhattan, and I took small groups to half-court games inside two Midtown residential buildings where friends of mine lived and to full-court games at my former high school and two other schools with regular evening runs.

From personal ties with teens and their parents and other family members, I established connections by phone and on social media. I developed personal and social media ties to about 80 teenagers, most closely with a subset of about 25 in this network. I checked my social media feeds repeatedly throughout each day and incorporated my observations online into my fieldwork routines on the ground to draft notes that linked digital and physical interaction. After I took screenshots, I made a point of asking the author or others involved about their social media content to check my assumptions.

Finally, this study entailed an acceptance and crossing of social distance. I felt that I was met with respect and kindness as a valued member of the community. But I was not an insider in the experience of Black youth and did not try to be. Instead, I tried to share parts of my life where I perceived an interest from teenagers generous enough to allow me to study their experience. I believe this approach allowed us to get to know each other and to build trust in mutual recognition of our distance.

Marmot’s brand image and the Mammoth “Biggie” Parka

Marmot is a high-end outdoor clothing company headquartered in Sonoma County, California. Marmot produces professional-grade gear for mountaineering and other adventure sports sold by authorized dealers across the United States, and distributed internationally in regions like Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Asia. On Marmot’s Facebook page, one gauge of the brand’s image, Timeline photos from July 2009 to July 2013 (about the time period discussed) show expeditions and competitive outdoor sports. These are scenes of mountain climbing, hiking, biking, skiing, and camping. The only photograph of urban space depicts a bicycle race on the street in Aspen, Colorado. There are no photographs of the Mammoth Parka or other references to the product. The vast majority of persons in these photos appear to be White.

According to a former independent sales rep who sold Marmot products to local wholesale retailers, the brand staked its reputation on selling “the most high end, most technical gear” on the mountain sports market. The Mammoth Parka was a side project for which Marmot used the same expensive materials and pro-grade production standards to create a stylish “urban tech” jacket for a niche cold-weather market. By co-labeling with Paragon Sports, New York’s flagship outdoors store, Marmot created exclusivity around the jacket and priced it accordingly, as high as US$600–US$700. The jacket was instantly recognizable by its puffed shape and monochromatic, often-bright exterior.

Among teenagers in Harlem, Marmot was known as “Merm” or “Murm” and the Mammoth, a “biggie.” The jacket’s exterior colors became “flavors” given names like “Pepsi blue” and “money green.” I rarely heard about purchases at Paragon. I mostly learned about secondhand transactions. Some through marketplaces on social media where biggies – listed by release year, size, condition, and flavor – were offered for cash (between about US$120 and US$350) or in exchange for other biggies, Pelle Pelle jackets (“Pels”), BB Simon designer belts, and other items; others by word of mouth, with discounts for friends and family members. I also heard about borrowing, bartering, and passing coats down, and locations in the Bronx alleged to sell counterfeits. But most important to the social value of the biggie was its peer-to-peer theft. This notoriety was essential to “the origin story” of the biggie in Harlem, of which there were not one but many accounts of robbing, getting robbed, or avoiding the robbery of a biggie.

If one story was known most widely, it might have been a fictional account. In 2010, When I asked Tiana (a pseudonym, as per all names that appear) why she thought biggies were popular, she pointed to Pay-Up, which was “not like a real movie that came out in the theaters. It’s like a ‘hood movie.’” Maine Brown, a young filmmaker from Harlem, wrote and directed Pay-Up, a feature-length DVD sold at Black Star Music & Video on Lenox Avenue near 128th Street. The movie, played by amateur actors, tells the story of three friends as they go on a robbery spree, first sticking up a deli in matching Black biggies and then robbing other friend groups of their biggies. The film dramatized what youth experienced directly as “biggie season.”

Biggie season

Media convergence

Muñiz and O’Guinn found that the personal websites maintained by admirers of the Saab, Macintosh, and Ford Bronco brands carried forward the messages and positive legacy of each company. In Harlem, however, an alternative brand narrative developed around Marmot in relation to danger. Social media, segmented ethnic media (Georgiou, 2013; Matsaganis et al., 2010), and local news converged in the enactment and coverage of the violence of biggie season. Teens used social media not only to promote individual and group identities through the Marmot brand but as a site to report and hear the news (Stevens et al., 2016) of biggie season. In early 2011, for example, word that a boy had been shot for his yellow biggie circulated after a teen nearby posted on his Facebook Wall, “shit is crazy … my block is 2 hot smh [shaking my head].” After a girl asked right away what happened, the boy replied: “idek [I don’t even know], i was in tha store and some spanish nigga just got clapped [shot] for his yellow.”

Biggie season also played out through segmented media. Along with Maine Brown’s film Pay-Up, rap performances, such as a YouTube freestyle by Vado in which the professional rapper from Harlem wears a blue biggie, and message boards like thehoodup.com where a thread titled “NYC WINTER GEAR 2010” asks “WHAT YALL f*ckin WITH THIS WINTER?” all contributed to a distinctly local narrative.

By 2011, New York news outlets began to cover biggie-related violence. Gothamist, in March 2011, reported that three suspects were indicted for murder after trying to rob an 18-year-old wearing a biggie who was hit by traffic when he tried to get away (Saxena, 2011). The most extensive news coverage followed a shooting in November 2013 that took place not in the city’s marginalized sections but in midtown Manhattan, at the skating rink in Bryant Park, where a 16-year-old purportedly attempted to rob a 20-year-old, shooting both the 20-year-old and a 14-year-old. A few days later, under the headline “Meet the ‘Biggie,’ the Parka with a Body Count,” New York Magazine published an interview with a clerk at Paragon, who said that Marmot had stopped manufacturing the coat and the last of the store’s inventory had sold (Giles, 2013). Biggies had reached a level of citywide notoriety.

Discussion

The present case reveals how teenagers in Harlem’s street world infused their living conditions into the Marmot brand as they branded themselves and their relationships in the physical and digital space of their neighborhood. The fear and violence of street life were transferred onto a coat and the marks of its brand. Muñiz and O’Guinn (2001) found that the imagery of a brand provided the source material for community. I found the opposite. The experience of a community gave meaning to a brand. With that meaning in place, community members used the brand as an input into themselves as personal brands. They created their own personal brands from or on top of consumer brands.

Muñiz and O’Guinn defined brand community in opposition to consumer subcultures that reject official brand meanings (Hebdige, 1979). Other marketing scholars, however, conceptualize subcultures as “hijacked” brand communities (Cova and Dalli, 2008; Cova and Pace, 2006; Veloutsou, 2009; Wipperfürth, 2005). Once brands get “hijacked” (Wipperfürth, 2005) by youth subcultures, brand specialists remarket the brand to more mainstream market segments to try to capture that edge of cool for those who were not part of it (Gladwell, 1997). Classic subcultural theorists describe a dialectic of youth appropriation and “bricolage,” and recapture and redistribution from the top again, driving youth on to ever new identities and brand relationships (Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1979). A company might also choose to reject its subcultural appropriation (Wipperfürth, 2005: 44–45). For instance, when Cristal was affectionately taken up and rebranded as “Cris” by hip-hop artists, the brand did not embrace this rebranding and Jay-Z answered back by boycotting the brand (Associated Press, 2006).

The Marmot Mammoth fit Wipperfürth’s (2005) specifications of brands that tend to get “hijacked”: Marmot was a utilitarian, values-driven company that created a blank-canvas product free of promotion but with exclusivity (pp. 44–45). The biggies’ case, however, suggests a novel variation in the brand-hijack trajectory. The segmented popularity of the biggie never radically impacted Marmot’s core marketing strategy. Marmot did not remarket the narrative developed in Harlem to capture a larger market share. Instead, the Mammoth Parka ran its course in a niche market as Marmot discontinued production in 2012. The brand never specified its reasons for termination and never commented publicly on the 2013 ice rink shooting or other violence. These business decisions implied a quiet market exit rather than reappropriation or rejection of its hijacked image.

Meanwhile, the teenagers appropriated not simply the Marmot brand but the surrounding logic of corporate and personal branding. They used the Marmot brand within a larger project of branding themselves and their group with nicknames, taglines, styles of posing, and wardrobe. By packaging and promoting themselves through the right keywords and clipped presentations of self, their behavior approximated what management experts like Tom Peters (1997) and his successor Dan Schwabel (2009) told corporate professionals they had to do to get hired by firms in an asset-based economy. Of course, the teenagers aimed not at prospective employers but at each other to communicate swagger, loyalty, and toughness to friends, rivals, and dating partners. Into the realm of personal relationships, teens imported a commercial logic (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Friedland and Alford, 1991). The teenagers possibly patterned their integration of personal branding with consumer brands on hip-hop culture and rap music where brand and artist references mix (Baksh-Mohammed and Callison, 2014; George, 1998; see also Patton et al., 2013).

That teens in Harlem were using social media in a manner idealized by branding specialists signaled a new overlapping of subculture and corporate culture. Social media furnishes new opportunities and incentives to package the self succinctly – much the way a modern brand operates – in addition to the tools to carry out this labor (e.g. free photo editing and graphic design platforms). As in the past, however, the teenagers in this study were not getting job-market value out of their self-marketing, but street credibility. Phillipe Bourgois (1995) described how by wearing “fly clothes” young men in East Harlem asserted and enjoyed their status on the street (pp. 158–159). But when they wore this clothing inside office buildings in midtown, they experienced embarrassment and preferred to stay uptown to avoid being looked down upon.

The digital labor of biggie season did not generate traditional economic opportunities for youth – whose job options remained mostly in part-time, “open-availability” retail and service positions – nor did it mobilize political opposition or outrage as youth violence became more visible online. On one hand, we might see this digital activity as only reproducing low economic status (Willis, 1977). On the other hand, such perspective minimizes the potential “human capital” in the branding skills and creativity exhibited. Street life is a media “career” in some sense. The teenagers involved in street teams were campaigning and competing for attention and presence in the neighborhood – making a name for themselves and their group through shifting and evolving roles. In 2015, I saw some of the group from 129th Street perform at Webster Hall. Like many of their peers in the street world, these young men were serious about their music as a new form of identity that they wanted to be lucrative. They shared a long bill at the concert venue with other local rap crews. When Smalls took the microphone during their set, he performed in front of one of the group’s two designated videographers, generating footage for their social media feeds and related future projects. The friend group had redefined themselves around their music as performers, videographers, video editors, producers, managers, and clothing designers. These entrepreneurial endeavors with media could be validated by the professional cultural industries so that youth themselves have the opportunity to market and profit from their styles.

In fact, the teenagers in this study were very much in pursuit of working lives, documenting their aspirations and progress online (Lane, forthcoming). I observed their pursuit of labor-market opportunities by utilizing the Harlem Children’s Zone, Job Corps, the community college system, and other resources that were shared and supported in person and more widely on social media.

To the brand-hijack trajectory, once the biggie was no longer being sold, the next high-end parka brand (Canada Goose) gained a measure of traction. But the street environment had changed with a series of large-scale gang indictments that used social media content, including group photos and individual nicknames and team names, as criminal conspiracy evidence (Lane, 2016). At least in the short term, the indictments reduced violence among street teams and prompted youth to be less visible with street life on social media. Young people who continued to be as public online assumed new risks of arrest. In other words, related shifts in urban neighborhoods and media may also influence brand communities.

This article has focused on a niche product appropriated by African American and Latino teenagers involved in street life, a small segment of the population most affected by racialized poverty and unemployment. But it may be that this study reveals broader practices of brand personalization and localization rooted in the social life of a preexisting community and contemporary opportunities for laypeople to brand themselves and their activity. To assess the scope of these findings, future scholars would need to examine the same collocated community in person and online using the same markers (shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and moral responsibility) while open to the full range of a brand’s possible interpersonal (Zelizer, 2005) and local (Kuehn, 2015) meanings and social uses (Lury, 2004; Manovich, 2001). In other words, community would need to be treated as the starting point rather than outcome of a brand.