Connecting Consumers and Building Community

Brand Communities as Consumer Collectives

Raja showed us how shifting focus from storytelling to story-making was a necessary step for Mastercard because consumers find ads annoying and disruptive. Story-making includes consumers in the process of creating brand value. And this inclusion increases engagement, and reduces the likelihood of churn.

Like story-making, cultivating brand community also actively involves consumers, rather than passively reaching out to them. Consumers form and take ownership of brand communities based on their attachment to brands. Brand communities can be a valuable asset, but they're also challenging to cultivate and manage.

Brand communities are an increasingly important strategy for many brands in today's marketplace. They are collectives of consumers. They are both physical and virtual meeting places, where consumers can connect with the brand, and most importantly, with each other. So brands are interested in creating brand communities to enhance connection with their consumers, to enhance connections among and between consumers, to increase engagement and loyalty, with the hope of building brand equity and creating brand value.

Jill describes three markers that help define brand communities.

So there's basically three markers of brand communities that sociologists have identified. And the first is a sense of "we-ness," a feeling of us versus them, a sense of belonging or "communitas." That's what we talk about when we talk about being in a community. And that gives people a safe place to be. It gives people connections to others.

The second marker of brand community is a sense of moral responsibility and helping. When you're in a brand community, you feel an affiliation with other members of the community. And that causes you to both feel comfortable seeking help from other community members, as well as offering help and support to others. Oftentimes, that sense of helping also carries through to the brand, so consumers in brand communities often feel a strong positive affiliation for the brand. And so they want to help the brand better itself, assert itself in culture.

And then the third marker of brand community that consumers derive value from is rituals and traditions. Rituals and traditions enhance the brand experience for a consumer because they're actually able to use their brand alongside other consumers. And that creates value for them.

Lastly, if we think about what consumers are doing in brand communities, oftentimes coming together with other consumers enables a sense of power for the consumer group. So collective bargaining begins to happen. The consumer gains more power against the company that owns the brand. So their voices are amplified as they're brought together with other consumers. So that can be an important benefit to consumers as well.

Jill identified three markers of brand communities:

1. Sense of belonging or “we-ness”
2. Sense of responsibility and helping
3. Rituals and traditions

Jill Avery offers some examples of brand communities across different industry verticals. Note that Jill mentions “social and identity value.” We will delve further into these types of value that consumers derive from brand communities later.

• Identity value is derived from an individual’s relationship to a brand, while social value is derived from relationships with other community members.
• Brands in verticals (industry markets) that are well-suited to these types of value can be especially hospitable to brand communities.

Successful brand communities crop up in many different industry verticals. So, some examples are car communities. Traditionally, people have been very passionate about their automobiles. Automobiles are identity markers for many consumers. And so we see very strong brand communities cropping up around automobile brands, such as Porsche, Jeep, Volkswagen, both offline and online opportunities for drivers to come together, to drive their cars, and experience them with others, to share mechanical tips about fixing their cars, or maintenance, and to just relish in the fact that they are joining a community of drivers.

Brand communities in the automotive area are often marked by rituals and traditions, such as giving a wave or honking your horn when you pass a fellow driver on the road. And that creates that sense of communitas, that sense of we-ness and of belonging.

On the more functional side, in the technology vertical, we often see brand communities crop up of users dedicated to helping each other solve technology problems, or create workarounds, or modify technology product to produce better. The Apple Mac community is a great example of users coming together to help each other enhance their enjoyment and use of their technology products from Apple.

EMC is a great example from the business-to-business world of a company that has created and manages multiple brand communities, dedicated to their business users, who can come together, swap stories and tips about how to best utilize the company's products and services to better enhance their operations.

Entertainment products is another vertical where brand communities are vibrant. Communities dedicated to things like Harry Potter, or Star Trek, or Star Wars. Thriving communities. People coming together to discuss the latest episode, or the latest movie that's coming out. Contributing fan fiction to expand the storytelling around a certain entertainment property. A lot of vibrancy in that area.

But we also see brand communities across most verticals, particularly with products that create either social or identity value for consumers.

Brand communities can be peripheral for some companies, while others design their entire business model around them. Let's consider a brief example. PatientsLikeMe, or PLM, is one of the world's largest patient community and digital health management platforms. It provides a forum for its members to share their personal stories and experiences with the disease, and find other patients like them and learn from each other.

The company describes its core value as helping patients answer the question, given my status, what is the best outcome that I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there? The company was founded by Jamie and Ben Heywood when their brother, Stephen, was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The brothers realized that dealing with the disease required a lot more than visiting doctors. Sharing experience between patients was just as valuable as sharing medical advice. This prompted them to build PLM as a community of like-minded patients.

Let's examine how the markers of brand community that Jill mentioned manifests among PLM users. The first marker is a sense of belonging. PLM patients give extremely positive feedback around the sense of belonging in the community. The platform provides a support system for patients with similar diseases, which can be hugely beneficial to patients, and is often difficult to find elsewhere.

The community also exhibits another important marker of brand community, a sense of responsibility. Patients on the platform are encouraged to share their experiences with each other, offering suggestions for dealing with the everyday challenges of living with a disease. For example, one patient discovered that using a medical toothbrush that contains a suction tube helped to keep their mouth free of saliva and toothpaste while brushing. This seemingly small change can provide a significant shift in the quality of life of ALS patients. Suggestions like this benefit the community in practical ways, but also patients' confidence.

PLM also uses patients' data for formal research about diseases, so patients on the platform feel they are contributing to a larger cause. Lastly, the PLM community created its own rituals and traditions. Because PLM is an online community of users, the rituals and traditions shared by its members appear in different ways than, say, Porsche owners. Nevertheless, PLM users do participate in some of the same collective actions.

In one case, after an article suggested that lithium might help treat symptoms of ALS, over two thousand patients on the PLM platform began voluntarily taking the drug and posting their results online. This informal patient-driven experiment led to official trials, which determined that lithium does not help ALS patients. While the results were disappointing, this collective action by the community spurred medical research.

Not all brand communities will take such a centered role in their company's business model. PLM sought out people with similar experiences and aimed to connect them. Other brand communities spring up around the shared appreciation of a brand. These communities are more common, and can be quite diverse.

Next, we will learn about the consumers that make up brand communities and the value they derive from them.

How Brand Communities Benefit Consumers

So far, we have discussed the markers of brand communities and the people that constitute them. Now we will take a closer look at the value that brand communities offer to their members.

Jill points out that brand communities are not monolithic. They contain customers at many different points of their journey.

People often ask me, who are these people who join brand communities? Are they an average consumer? A typical consumer? Or are they consumers that operate at the extremes? The fact is that brand communities are incredibly diverse. They contain existing consumers of a brand. They contain prospective consumers of a brand. And they contain people who may never be able to afford, or be able to purchase the brand for other reasons, but for some reason, have an affinity with that brand.

For example, the Porsche brand community is filled with current Porsche owners, prospective Porsche owners who might be currently searching in the marketplace to purchase a car, and Porsche lovers. Brand communities are also populated with people who have a complaint with the brand, who despise the brand, who want to come into the community and cause some trouble for the brand.

So when we look at the spectrum of people in a brand community, it tends to be an incredibly diverse group of people. Loyal brand consumers tend to be very vocal in brand communities. But people who hate the brand strongly, also tend to be very vocal in brand communities.

And then the last thing is brand communities consist of active posters and active content creators, and then many listeners. Most consumers who are engaged in brand communities are what we would label lurkers, people who are there, reading and listening to the conversations, but who never contribute to the conversation.

So when managing a brand community, we need to recognize and understand the diversity of types of consumers that are in that brand community, why they're there, and what value they're deriving from it.

Jill explains what makes brand communities attractive to consumers: the creation of social and identity value.

Brand communities often contribute both social value and identity value to consumers. So identity value for consumers comes from the fact that people use brands to either create, enhance, or project our identities. So by affiliating with a particular brand community, I communicate to others in my social world that I am the type of person who loves Volkswagen, or I am the type of person who uses Dell. And that creates identity signaling value for me.

The second type of value that brand communities provide is social value. And social value comes from connections among consumers, that sense of we-ness and communitas that comes from meeting someone who shares your love for a brand. Every time I engage in a ritual or tradition with others around a brand, that's creating social value, that's bringing me out of loneliness, connecting me to other people, allowing me to have conversations with others with shared interests. And that creates social value for consumers.

We have learned that brand communities can benefit different types of consumers in different ways. Next, we will learn how brand communities benefit the brands themselves.

How Brand Communities Benefit Companies

Let’s take a quick jump back to a company that you’re familiar with. Here is Tarang Amin from e.l.f. explaining how valuable e.l.f.’s brand community was from the very beginning of his time there. E.l.f.’s inception as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business produced a community of consumers that were already invested in the brand when Tarang joined in 2014 while e.l.f. was transitioning into retail distribution.

Because this was a brand that was extraordinary value and started with an online community, inherently was more disruptive to begin with in terms of our engagement model. So our engagement is 100% digital, very strong both on socially in terms of bringing people to our site, how we're able to activate our community that way, was quite different than most of the other brands in our space.

The original barriers of entry in our category was, do you have the wherewithal to set up a makeup counter or hog up shelf space in large national retailers? We could go direct-to-consumer. And in that direct-to-consumer exposition, the most powerful tactic we have is our own community.

We will often look at something that has inspiration. Our Poreless Putty Primer that retails for $9, actually compares to a Tatcha Silk Canvas product at $52. We will introduce our Poreless Putty Primer. We can activate socially and digitally, and we never have to do the comparison. Our community will do it.

You will get millions of responses of, oh, my God, you have to get this. It's better than Tatcha Silk Canvas. Tatcha sells for $52, this sells for $9, you have to try it. And call it that exposition to consumers, which fundamentally changed the entire equation, where inexpensive equals cheap.

Tarang mentioned that e.l.f. benefitted from its strong brand community’s ability to advocate for the value of its products. Think of one or two other ways that brands benefit from a strong and active brand community.

E.l.f.'s brand community is active and vocal in social media, making it an asset to e.l.f.'s marketing strategy. But not all companies have the benefit of a pre-existing community that is already connected and vocal.

In the 1980s, Harley-Davidson was struggling against an economic recession and competition from imported motorcycles that were viewed by consumers as more reliable. In conjunction with technological advancements and some legal lobbying to encourage American consumers to buy domestically produced motorcycles, Harley-Davidson invested in building up its brand community and strengthening the company's ties to its riders and fans.

In fact, Harley-Davidson management decided to restructure its entire business model around its brand community. They did this in several ways. First, it began by staffing community outreach events with Harley-Davidson employees. It also required executives to spend time in the field with customers. These changes led to more employees becoming active riders, and brought more riders on staff.

But perhaps the most impactful change was the creation of the Harley Owners Group, or HOG, a customer community organization that formalized the Harley-Davidson brand community, and brought it closer to the company with a direct line of communication with Harley-Davidson's president. Membership was open to anyone that owned a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and a one-year membership was included with the purchase of every motorcycle.

HOG was founded in 1983, and its membership reached thirty-three thousand within a year. By 1999, it had over half a million members. Through HOG, Harley customers were able to meet one another, develop relationships, participate in community service events, and ride their motorcycles together.

The group organizes formal events, called rallies, that connect local chapters to national and international communities. Rallies can be stationary in which HOG members from a large area meet up at a single destination, or touring in which riders get together to travel along a selected route with designated stops along the way. Many riders attend rallies regularly to rekindle friendships and maintain traditions.

In a rally called The Posse Ride, stretching from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, riders spontaneously produce the Posse Oath, which was recited at gatherings, and became part of the promotional materials for subsequent rallies.

Harley-Davidson's reinvestment in its brand community revitalized the brand and led to great success throughout the '90s and 2000s. When the Harley Owners Group celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2008, Harley-Davidson was valued at $7.8 billion, making it a top fifty global brand.

So far, we have examined e.l.f.’s online community and Harley-Davidson’s offline community. One example of a brand that has grown its brand community in both online and offline spaces is Glossier. Glossier began as a blog that offered beauty product reviews, how-tos, and insight into the beauty routines of inspiring individuals. Glossier eventually grew into an online brand that curated beauty products, before moving into retail stores. Jill Avery will explain how Glossier’s presence in both online and offline spaces proved to be mutually beneficial for the brand.

One of the more recent, most successful online brand communities is beauty brand Glossier, which has curated conversations among consumers about beauty products, skincare, and the role of beauty in today's culture.

So traditionally, we've thought about retail stores as selling spaces. Increasingly, brand managers are seeing retail stores as branding spaces, as spaces for community members to come together and to have a communal experience. Many stores are creating opportunities in their physical spaces for consumers to create experiences that they can then bring back to the digital world.

So for example, Glossier creates in their stores Instagrammable spaces where consumers can take photographs while they're in the physical space, that they then post to their social media feeds, bringing the physical back to the digital.

In an omnichannel world, we see consumers moving very fluidly between the online and the offline spaces for communing that brand managers offer.

Building, Managing and Leveraging Brand Communities

Whether online or offline or a mix of both, brand communities create value for consumers and companies. Jill discusses what managers need to know to help grow their brand communities.

So how does one build a brand community? That's the key question for today's managers.

I want to start by differentiating between two different types of brand communities. And the first is a consumer-initiated and managed brand community. These are organic fan clubs, if you will, that spring up. They are initiated and managed and nurtured by consumers themselves. They're incredibly authentic because someone out there decided that they wanted to curate a community dedicated to a brand.

So some brands have coexisting consumer-initiated communities. Other brands don't have that and say, we want to initiate and manage a community. And if a brand has a strong relationship with its consumers, they can often launch and create a meeting place either offline or online where consumers will want to flock together, meet each other, and engage with the brand.

So the first step for managers looking to create brand communities is to create a meeting place, whether that's online or offline, and a reason to come, a reason to be there, and some value for consumers.

We want to be able to create a place where people feel like they belong, where they can have conversations and engage both with the brand's employees, but also and more importantly, with each other. And then we want to start to initiate or encourage the development of rituals and traditions because those are the things that create engagement with consumers.

Jill points out that one of the biggest challenges to building a brand community can be managers attempting to exert too direct an influence over it.

The biggest challenge with initiating and managing brand communities is a heavy hand. Managers need to be careful, to give up control of the brand and its communications to consumers in brand communities.

A big role of brand communities is co-creation of brand meaning. And so, if brand managers take a heavy approach to managing a brand community, the conversations become less authentic. They become heavily moderated. Anything that consumers say that is negative about a brand gets scrubbed from the site. That creates a lack of authenticity. That creates an environment that's not safe for consumers to talk with each other about the brand.

And oftentimes, in brand communities that are heavily managed by the firm, consumers will leave, break off, splinter, and create their own brand communities.

So managers need to be careful, and they need to think about what their role is in a brand community. Should they listen? Should they engage? Or should they just respond when a consumer asks a question?

Some brand managers ignore brand communities, and feel that that's a consumer-initiated and managed effort. Others actively engage and curate the discussions alongside consumers.

So, deciding how heavy a moderation hand in the community a manager has is super important for determining the success of the community.

As Professor Avery mentioned, the interactions between brand managers and brand communities can exist on a spectrum.

Much like embracing and leveraging earned media, partnering with brand communities requires forgoing some managerial autonomy. Communities may rebel or resist if companies try to steer them too directly.

Let's look at two approaches that companies took to broaden the gender appeal of their products. In these two examples, the level of control each company attempted to assert over the community varied greatly.

Both Harley-Davidson and Porsche have primarily male customers, and they could potentially grow their sales significantly by appealing to women.

In 2003, Porsche introduced the Porsche Cayenne, the brand's first sports utility vehicle and its first vehicle that was not a sports car. Owners of Porsche, predominantly male, reacted strongly, perceiving this new SUV to be Porsche's attempt to court a different demographic, which some of them felt to be a betrayal. As one owner stated, "The Cayenne makes me feel like my favorite jazz record shop has decided to carry Britney Spears records."

Drivers leveraged their community against Cayenne to show their displeasure with Porsche's decision. They ridiculed Cayenne owners within the brand community and excluded them from the community's cultural rituals, such as refusing to wave to or acknowledge them on the road as they would with other Porsche owners.

In contrast, Harley-Davidson made little effort to appeal to a female demographic. Nonetheless, women have come to make up a significant minority of Harley riders. In 2013, Harley-Davidson claimed to have sold more new motorcycles to women than all other motorcycle producers combined. Women who own Harley-Davidson tend to identify with the Harley-Davidson's masculine, rebellious brand, creating less friction in the male-dominated community.

In both cases, the companies expanded their market share by selling their products to women. But Porsche's more overt move to cater to a new audience on the margins of its community created backlash, while Harley-Davidson's female demographic grew organically out of its community.

As the Porsche example illustrates, the desires and goals of a brand community do not always align with those of the brand’s managers. Jill describes how brand communities can become liabilities to companies.

Not all brand communities are successful. Brand communities bring consumers together around their love for a brand, but brand communities also form among consumers who are frustrated with or actually hate a brand.

So there are pro-brand communities, and there are anti-brand communities. And as a brand manager, we need to understand that both types of communities will crop up and need to be managed.

If a brand encroaches too much on communities, if a brand sells too hard and doesn't create enough value for consumers, consumers may rebel, push the brand managers out of the conversation, or they may move to more critical conversations. They may begin to parody the brand in ways that are detrimental to the brand's meaning.

Brand hijacking happens when a community is not necessarily aligned with the interests of the brand. So we often see communities crop up that are anti-brand. These are consumers who are coming together and communing not around their love for a brand, but instead for their hatred for a brand.

So we have sites like Walmart Sucks, or Dell Hell, where people can come together to share their frustrations about a particular brand, to complain about service interactions, or to share tips on how to get deeper discounts or how to game the system against a particular brand.

Oftentimes, in brand communities, the conversations are contributing negative brand associations or information or messaging that would not be desirable to the brand's managers.

Jill mentions Walmart Sucks and Dell Hell as two examples of situations in which brand communities have developed around frustrations with brands.

• Dell Hell grew out of a blog written by journalist Jeff Jarvis recounting his abysmal customer service experience with Dell.
• Dell eventually reframed Dell Hell into a more positive media piece. Dell’s public relations team began actively listening to feedback from bloggers, including Jarvis. It began blogging in response and even invited Jarvis to visit Dell and speak to founder and CEO Michael Dell.
• While Jarvis is still sometimes critical of Dell, he was quick to praise its efforts to listen more closely to its community. His column in Business Week recounting his visit to Dell was largely positive.
• Walmart Sucks is a blog that started in 2006 that shares horror stories from Walmart employees and customers.

Here, Jill discusses retention in brand communities.

Note that Jill mentions the term “incremental purchase,” a concept that you were introduced to earlier. Remember that this term refers to purchases or sales that would not have happened if some marketing action had not been taken.

In a similar vein, she also mentions “incremental loyalty” here, which has a similar meaning: loyalty that happens in addition to what already existed, as the result of an action.

Brand communities are a brand equity building and destroying activity because they have the potential to produce new meanings for the brand. And that meaning can either be highly positive and create new brand stories and associations for a brand, or those conversations in brand communities can be quite negative and actually erode brand equity.

So brands that are going to be more successful in this space are brands that already have those strong relationships with consumers on a one-to-one basis. Brands for which consumers already have loyalty are going to be brands that are going to have more success attracting and becoming a magnet to create community activities.

So it starts with having a strong brand, strong brand relationships, and then trying to leverage that into a community. And then once the community is formed, successful brands are going to differentiate by enabling and unleashing consumers' creativity.

The more brands can allow and facilitate strong real communications and connections between consumers, the more brand managers can create true engagement opportunities for two-way conversations between consumers and the brands managers, the more successful and differentiated that community will be.

The hope for brand managers is that a brand community is brand equity enhancing. That it's creating brand awareness. It's creating new brand stories and contributing positively to brand meaning. It's creating a sense of brand liking and brand preference. And the ultimate hope is that consumer's engagement in brand communities will lead to incremental purchase, incremental loyalty, and retention over time.

Brand Communities and Engagement

Jill explained that strong brand communities grow out of brands having strong one-to-one relationships with consumers. You may also recall that we discussed the role that owned media can play in creating a deeper relationship with customers.

While there are risks involved, brand communities can provide great benefits to companies at many different points in the customer journey. Jill explains how brand communities interact with the customer acquisition funnel.

Jill will mention “social commerce,” which is a term that refers to the sale of products and services on social media platforms. 

Brand community activity can both be what we call top of the funnel activity, middle of the funnel activity, or bottom of the funnel activity. And what I mean by that is, oftentimes, brand community activity is building very early connections with consumers. It's operating at the top of a marketing funnel by creating brand awareness, by contributing to brand knowledge.

Oftentimes, consumers will seek out brand communities, particularly online, to learn about a new brand. So that type of activity may not lead to an immediate click-to-buy purchase, but may be seeding future purchases that will happen further down the line.

One of the challenges in brand communities is how do you move from conversations to purchase. The brand manager's goal is to either drive a new purchase or an incremental purchase among consumers of brand communities, or increase loyalty and retention.

The challenge becomes when we start to insert into organic consumer-to-consumer conversations a sales pitch, particularly a heavy sales pitch that feels commercial, that sometimes feels artificial, and consumers might rebel against that.

The key to moving from brand communities to social commerce to getting from conversation to purchase is to make sure that that commercial message actually holds real value for the consumers. And we've seen companies do this incredibly successfully.

Glossier, a beauty brand, actually uses its brand communities for input into research and development for the development of new products. So in the Glossier brand community, a call goes out for ideas about a new skincare product, and consumers contribute those ideas.

And then the commercialization happens. When the product is launched, Glossier goes back to its brand community, contributes a message that says, "Thank you so much for your input. We have listened. We've created this new product for you. And we hope that you'll enjoy it."

And that's that gentle push towards purchase that makes community members feel more comfortable and less of a hard sales pitch.

The most beneficial thing a manager can do for the brand community is to provide space for it to grow. We have now learned from several examples where consumers took great advantage of platforms provided by brands.

During Harley-Davidson rallies, spontaneous production of traditions and rituals were transformed into marketing materials and branded merchandise. E.l.f. used its consumer base to produce earned media content on TikTok by leveraging videos of its customers lip-syncing to their catchy song, "Eyes.Lips.Face."

And we learned how Glossier provides Instagrammable spaces in its retail stores to allow customers to take selfies with its products. In these cases, when consumers were given space to engage creatively with brands and one another, their creative expressions ultimately benefited the brands by building a loyal customer base.

Facilitating engagement between consumers and providing platforms for them to interact fosters community and creates lasting relationships between brands and their consumers. By prioritizing the growth and engagement of their brand communities, managers can deepen their customers' engagement, reduce churn, and strengthen their brand's value to ensure long-term success.

We’ve now covered customer engagement through several examples. We approached this topic by examining the following strategies:

• Personalization
• Story-making
• Fostering brand community

Retention is a key driver of long-term value of customers, and a much more efficient way to increase sales than acquiring new ones. Keeping customers engaged with your brand is essential to retaining them, and we have covered three different strategies that companies have used to do so.

We have learned how personalization engages customers at THE YES, and story-making engaged customers at Mastercard. We also learned how brand communities can be powerful tools for increasing customer loyalty and engagement, but carry the risk of less company control.

There are several other methods for improving retention. For example, we have previously discussed how owned media and email campaigns can be effective ways to engage existing customers. Companies can improve customer satisfaction and retention by creating systems to resolve their problems quickly and efficiently.

In addition to well-trained staff at call centers, companies are beginning to use AI and ChatGPT bots to resolve customer complaints. Managers have many tools at their disposal to keep customers engaged. Creative use of these tools can create long-term engagement with customers, increasing their long-term value to the firm.

We have examined how companies can use digital marketing tools to influence customers at different points in their acquisition and retention journey. Next, we will learn how managers measure the success of their digital marketing campaigns, and how they balance budget across the customer journey.

We have been focused on strategies for moving customers through the marketing funnel. We explored customer acquisition, and we discussed strategies for reducing churn and increasing retention. 

Now that we’ve gone into detail on these strategies, it’s time to take a step back. How can you measure the long-term success and sustainability of your marketing campaigns?

This is the question that we will turn to in the final set of articles on Digital Marketing. As you will learn, the answer to this question can be quite complex.