Despite the growing quest for knowledge about the importance of brands, we know little about how consumers attach meaning to them in their daily lives. With this in mind, we carried out this study to identify how consumers confer meanings to brands when interacting with each other, assuming that social interactions is a strong influence among consumers and, therefore, the impressions of some interfere with the judgments of others. To this end, an ethnography of communication was undertaken through participant observation of everyday interaction of people from different social groups. A key finding was that people use brands as a means of stigmatizing one another in social interactions. Our findings align with the social theory of Erving Goffman, which may be based on a rich interpretation of this level of significance of brands by consumers. Our results point to twenty-four forms of stigmatization by the marks, divided into three categories: "communal", "social" and "personal." In the end, we analyzed the possible contributions of our study for both academia and for brand management.
brands; consumption; stigma; ethnography of communication; language
