Brand Community or Community of Context?
According to a few reports, 2015 will be the year of the brand community. The crux of the arguement is that as social media “matures”, the brand community will make a comeback. As customers continue to face frustrations associated with Facebook and Twitter, brands should devote more attention to cultivating communities.
Why?
Brand communities create a broader reach.
Brand communities can provide a location for people to research. Satisfied prostpects convert to customers.
Brand communtiy strengthens loyalty and increases CLV.
There are two approaches to consider when building a community. The traditional model places the brand at the center (brand community). The brand builds the architecture and suposes fans will take up residency. The second approach, strengthened by our use of social media tools, places an emphasis on finding specific communities of context and adding a very specific value.
Brand Community
Conceptually, Muniz Jr. and O’Guinn (2001) described brand communities as: “specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of relationships among admirers of a brand”. Specifically, these are consumer collectives that are built around coproducer activities or consumption practices. For consumers, these communities often address identity, meaning, and status-related concerns (Schau, Muniz Jr and Arnould, 2009).
Most importantly, McAlexander, Schouten and Koenig (2002) remind us that “brand community is customer-centric, that the existence and meaningfulness of the community inherent in customer experience rather than in the brand around which the experience revolves” (McAlexander, Schouten and Koenig, 2002). Scholars define three markers of community: conscious of kind, shared rituals and a sense of moral responsibility. However, I believe that value may not necessarily be derived by specific tactics used to develop these markers of community as posited by Muniz Jr. and O’Guin, but by understanding certain shifts. These shifts create a need to reexamine how communities form and create value.
According to the Harvard Business Review in ‘Getting Brand Communities Right”, there are three drivers of value for brand community: feedback, advocacy and purpose. Threaded through all three, is the idea that people are talking directly, or indirectly, about the brand. In many cases, word-of-mouth and brand community are linked.
Brand community: A fanatic fallacy?
From a managerial perspective, the consensus is that word-of-mouth must be “harnessed” (see also: Hughes, Rosen, Dye, Sernovitz). The harnessing of word-of-mouth is often in reference to leveraging the power of customers sharing their experiences with a brand’s products or services. Similarly, harnessing can mean to leverage a brand asset to create word-of-mouth. One leverage is the brand community. It is a common belief that brand communities are comprised of fanatics who will spread their experiences far and wide. You simply grow a community of followers and enjoy the proverbial word-of-mouth fruit. The genesis being McAlexander Schouten and Koenig’s ethnographic study on Harley Davidson’s brand community. Brand managers have extended this work by incorporating Pareto’s famous 80/20 rule into this concept. Thus, 20 percent of a brand’s consumers are the vital few that celebrate their loyalty openly.
Lovemarks are great in theory
The trouble with this notion is that it is rather unfounded. In fact, if we use the often-cited Harley Davidson research (my guess is that the research on Volkswagen is used similarly), Harley owners actually purchase other bikes twice as often. Those considered loyalists only make up one-tenth of Harley’s consumer base and a mere 3.5 percent of their revenue. Sen found similar results within the restaurant industry. In addition, and this occurs over multiple product categories, consumers rarely consider just one brand. As Lapersonne found, only one-fifth of buyers consider only one brand when making a purchase. While it may no sound grandiose, true growth is achieved by increasing market penetration, not through the fevered purchasing of the fanatics. (See also)
Does loyalty = word-of-mouth?
Secondly, there is the belief that these loyalist advocate on behalf of the brand by frequently sharing their love. The reality is that the recommendation of these loyalist may not have the effect commonly believed. First, it shouldn’t be a stretch to assume that most of this sharing is insular- meaning shared among the already fanatical (remember the group that accounts for 3.5 percent of revenue). Yeh and Choi found that positive identification with a brand community influenced (more precisely, influenced WOM intention) word-of-mouth among members. It is new customers who are more likely to spread information about products and services. Much of the literature attributes a product’s novelty, or a positive experience, to word-of-mouth. As fanaticism fades, so too does our eagerness to share. Nam et al. found that only one-fifth of customers will ultimately perform word-of-mouth after a positive customer experience.
Byron Sharp hammered this point home: “Within every brand’s customer base there are a few people who feel much more attitudinally committed to the brand. It may be part of their self-image…but the marketing consequences of these brand fans turn out to be very limited”.
It is easy to fall in love with the narrative that building strong communities will create “loyalty beyond reason” and inspire a chorus of word-of-mouth. As storybook as it may be, growth is experienced through penetration, making volume of conversations, not the conversations of the 20 percent who are considered loyalist, (see: East, Hammond and Lomax, 2008) a much stronger marker for success.
This old model of brand community views the brand community as a marketing channel, built around the focus of the brand.
Communities of context
How we gather online is a reflection of the fluidity of how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Social media gives us unlimited bandwidth to explore and seek out those who are similiar. As a way to participate, and as a strategy to add to our sense of self, we seek out communities. Communities are built through our desire to belong, strengthen our identity, create something or experience something shared.
We no longer need the brand to either create this venue, or help us to reconcile our identity. There are enough corners of the Web to find communities that cater to specific means.
What develops are communities of context. I would identify communities of context as tribes under Bernard Cova and Shankar’s definition: “…loosely based, and may not necessarily be built around a brand, or around consumption”.
While loosely defined, communities of context accurately portray how communities over multiple channels meet the ebb and flow of our same transient behaviors.
Wonderopolis
When the National Center for Family Literacy went looking for ways to boost literacy rates among youth and their family, they didn’t create an NCFL community. They created Wonderopolis. Communications focused on the many teachers who felt frustrated by the drive to plan lessons that simply developed standardized test zombies. The context, or common shared interest, was a program, which for even five minutes would allow them to engage their students in a new and creative way (literacy was never mentioned).
With the sheer volume and means by which we communicate, the nature of our relationships are constantly changing. Instead of building communities around brands, contexts provide much clearer methods of supporting spaces that allow people to align with a specific purpose. Opportunities for brands arise when they can create opportunities to strengthen this space, or strengthen the connections felt between people.
