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Consumer Behavior Assignment

For this exercise, I have decided to analyze the Online Community of Poker Players.

The first of the four types are the tourists who lack strong social ties to the group, and maintain only a superficial or passing interest in the consumption activity. Here, they do nothing but sometimes observe videos of poker tournament, or play for free on social networks (like facebook). They do not feel really committed in poker activities.
Next are the minglers who are only perfunctorily interested in the poker playing activity. They maintain strong social ties with other players or fan, comment on blogs, but as the category we have described right above does, they almost never participate in real poker tournament.
Devotees are opposite to this: they maintain a strong interest in and enthusiasm for the consumption activity, but have few social attachments to the group. They are registered on specialized websites such as Fulltiltpoker, Pokerstar, Everestpoker and so on, and they only play there (they do not consider poker online as a classical hobby, and they never play for free).
On this kind of site, people actually were given the opportunity to go and play the game they were interested in—and thus to directly consume.

Finally, insiders are those who have strong social ties and strong personal ties to the consumption activity. Their consumption activity online looks like the devotees, but in addition to that, on the social field they behave like minglers. They tend to be far more social and relational in their group communication. To them, the social contact of online communication is in itself a valuable reinforcement.

Nicolas Veyronnet
Group