This paper explores and explains the emergence of commercial blogging. Studying the contents of 18 of Sweden's top fashion blogs, our findings suggest that bloggers create value by generating improved transaction efficiencies. Fashion bloggers have high credibility and thus facilitate the flow of consumer information and choice. The blogs present a combination of private and commercial content, thereby creating a customer intimacy that differentiates them from more traditional market channels. The value of these relationships is appropriated partly through advertisements and partly from other sources of revenue, such as the creation of brands and online stores. Bloggers have become powerful intermediaries who often have a better contact with end consumers than fashion firms. This paper therefore suggests that management of the blogosphere is an emerging source of competitive advantage for fashion firms.

Purpose – By using the concept of style, this article aims to elaborate on the notion of brand community. More specifically, it seeks to explore how style can function as a linking value in forms of communities centred on brands that emerge within the empirical context of fashion and social media.

Design/methodology/approach - A netnography of the content produced by 18 fashion bloggers in Sweden was conducted. Content analysis of this material was used to map how consumption objects, in terms of fashion brands, were integrated in activities taking place on blogs, and through these processes, acted as a linking value for community members.

Findings – This paper demonstrates how fashion bloggers, together with their readers, constitute a form of community centred on style. It also shows how fashion bloggers, by combining and assembling fashion brands and products, articulate and express different style sets, and how they, together with their followers, engage in activities connected to these style ideals.

Research limitations/implications - As this study has been empirically limited to a Swedish setting, future research would benefit from findings of international expressions of communities of style.

Practical implications - Based on this study, strategies for managing communities of style is suggested to represent a potential source of competitive advantage for fashion firms.

Originality/value – In the context of the conceptual discussion about what brings members of communities together, this study provides evidence of how style can function as a linking value in the setting of consumer communities that emerge within the boundaries of fashion and social media.

Within marketing research, the notion of “vigilante marketers” has been offered to describe consumers' increased participation in the production of marketing messages and processes of value co-creation. Using a value network approach, the purpose of this study is to explain the role of vigilante marketers in their interaction with firms seeking to impose managerial control and influence processes of co-creation of brand values. A netnography of the content produced by 18 market-leading fashion bloggers in Sweden was conducted during 2009. This study revealed that these fashion bloggers are part of an emergent value network and have realised the value that they co-create for brands using various forms of vigilante marketing. The findings presented in this paper challenge the notion of vigilante marketing as an independent and unpaid activity, illustrating how a value network approach can facilitate the study of the borderlands emerging between consumers and producers.

A common feature of studies in the fields of personal branding and self-marketing has been the use of a labour market setting as their point of departure. As a result, studies have identified several challenges in the borderland between personal brands and corporate brands. However, more knowledge is needed concerning personal branding in an entrepreneurial context. This article seeks to explain how personal brands materialise in a process in which individuals engage in entrepreneurial ventures over time. Studying three professional bloggers in Sweden, the paper shows how these individuals have all engaged in personal branding efforts and, over the years, have become entrepreneurs operating several business ventures. This article shows how personal branding efforts can generate competitive advantages for individuals undertaking entrepreneurial ventures. Furthermore, it argues why conditions for individuals to engage in personal branding might be more favourable in an entrepreneurial context than in a labour market setting.