Beyond the Screen: How Online Communities Shape Offline Consumer Behavior

This research examines how digital communities reshape consumption, identity formation, and marketplace participation through an analytic-inductive qualitative design combining netnography, immersive journaling, and in-depth interviews. This research explores how engagement in online communities fosters offline participation and consumer behavior, revealing how creativity, mentorship, and shared identity are collectively constructed across digital and physical spaces. While research on consumer tribes and social identity has examined brand communities and fan cultures, little attention has been paid to digital collectives where leisure, artistry and commerce intertwine. Grounded in consumer culture theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Arnould et al., 2019; Schau et al., 2009) and consumer tribes (Cova & Cova, 2002; Kozinets, 2020), this research investigates how digital engagement within groups translates into real-world behaviors. Methodologically, the project employs an analytic-inductive qualitative design (Tracy, 2024), combining a netnography of online needlepoint communities and in-depth interviews with active participants. Preliminary analysis suggests that online participation functions as both creative apprenticeship and social belonging, reinforcing participants’ sense of legitimacy within the community. Initial findings show that digital sociability revitalizes analog practices while influencing purchasing behavior and community-driven innovation. The findings are expected to extend conceptualizations of digital collectivism by demonstrating how online practices are revitalized through digital sociability.