Brand scouting: co-creation of value in the Football Manager community

Previous research has highlighted the blurred distinction between production and consumption and the diversity of ways through which consumers engage in value co-creation with companies, either at the individual or at the collective level. However, the exact process of collective value co-creation, the roles of consumers in the process and the reasons for consumer participation remain somehow unclear. The aim of this paper is to further explore how and why consumers participate in value co-creation in the context of brand-centered communities. Our study is based on a netnographic study of the Football Manager (FM) game community and interviews with key community members. The FM game is a football management simulation game. The task of gamers is to act as football managers by taking control of a football team of their choice, in any league of the world, and manage team tactics and squad selection, player transfers, and other duties associated with the football manager post (Crawford 2006). Gamers build their imaginative football management careers through the temporal progression of the game. Given its simulation character, one of the most important and fulfilling aspects of the FM game is its capacity to offer a realistic representation of the football world. To achieve this, each year the company releases a new edition of the game, containing the latest information on the football world. This information is stored in a huge database upon which the game is based. The FM Greek online community is a fan-site affiliate Greek community, but is not officially associated with the company that creates the game, namely Sports Interactive. Our findings illustrate how members of the FM community participate in the co-creation of the FM game through the concept of brand scouting. We conceptualize brand scouting as the cyclical process through which brand and/or product enthusiasts are committed, as members of a brand-centered community, to providing unpaid research work for the brand in the form of scouting undertaken within and beyond the confines of the community for the sake of enhancing their consumption experiences. We further describe how the process of brand scouting extends and goes beyond current theorizations of value co-creation.