Preface Throughout the last years the brand community phenomenon gained increasing importance for companies and consumer alike. It offers companies the chance to increase the brand loyalty of their customers and to open up their innovation processes by integrating selected customers. Yet it also poses major questions to managers. Should we create our own brand community? How can we manage the permanent interaction with our customers once we started the brand community? Brand loyalty is strongly driven by brand community integration. In contrast to most of the literature which focuses on the...