Connecting With A Brand Community

Using a brand community and communities of style to reach your consumers authentically

“Go where your audience lives” is an important mantra that all brands should keep in mind when advertising to them. You need to know everything about your audience before you can cater effective campaigns to them. This is where communities are built - within your audience. Your audience all have things in common that help them relate with your brand. Communities can help consumers connect and identify with your brand; members within the community feel a connection to not only the focal brand but to the other members as well. Creating a brand community is giving a brand their own voice while also understanding that the community (the audience) can help shape that voice through their own personal connections and shared values. Not only does a brand community help you to retain customers, but it also helps you collect new ones through word-of-mouth while gaining insight into who you are selling to, thus improving your other marketing efforts.

What is a Brand Community?

A brand community is a term used to describe like-minded customers who identify with a particular brand and share significant values and traits. In other words a brand community is your brand’s customers, fans and advocates - the brand champions, those invested in the brand and those who reap the rewards of success. In order to reach a brand community you first must identify who they are for your brand and what they are looking for when engaging with your company. To have an effective community, brands must understand, provide meaning, and put their brand second. They also need to know how to integrate and engage with their audience’s community authentically.

Creating Communities of Style

One way that brands connect with their communities authentically is through “communities of style” - brands are assembled and combined into different brand combinations that together support social action amongst members. This is the coupling of brands that reach the needs of shared consumers creating a stronger connected brand community - we’re no longer talking to just one audience but to those with a like minded infinity to the brand and brands like yours. Imagine a brand working with a sports influencer to sell their product, things to think about with the influencer are who are their sponsors and what do there sponsors want to get out of the relationship. If the influencer is going to be integrated into a campaign than the sponsor surely wants their product or logo in there as well. By connecting communities of style we are able to work alongside other brands to reach the goals of all parties - the brands get the exposure they want and the consumers get the content they are looking for.

This is what we did for a previous campaign with Volkswagen. We took a professional surfer and mountain biker and put them into different models of vehicles (Tiguan & SportWagen AllTrack), both with different targets but a community that has a connection to each models personality. VW were the lead campaign brand, however with the athletes having a larger reach into communities that included new fans with like-minded interests we were able to expand that campaign to a whole new community with a higher potential to purchase. We then went and brought in all of their invested partners – sponsors – building them into the campaign by developing stand alone content for them to use on their platforms and integrating them into the VW content to gain added exposure and eyeballs. By doing this we are reaching out to not just surfers or bikers but also outdoor enthusiasts, travelers, weekend warriors, campers, adventurers etc. and the community that goes along with them. We are no longer working with only the lead brand VW, but instead we’ve built an army of complimentary brands that bring value to all parties and deliver complimentary audiences to an already established brand community.

Communicating with a Brand Community

A strong community is a connected community. In order to create a connected community we need to know where to find our consumers - whether online or on the street, and we need to know how to talk to them and know what content they want to see. It is the concept of peeling back the onion layers, it's one thing to have an influencer or a brand on the frontline but how do we dig deeper than that? In order to reach the brand community we need to get to where the audience is most, this could mean integrating a campaign into social or into day to day projects or programming. Anything to bring your brand closer to the community to satisfy the needs of the audience. A strong connected community elevates a brand helping those on the outside differentiate your brand from others and helping those on the inside feel like they are part of something that adds value to who they are.

Brand communities are not a lone marketing objective but a business strategy that demands authenticity for them to work. Brand communities are unique and create customer engagement as well as overall brand advocacy - having the power to take your brand to exciting and unexpected places.