Engaging Brand Communities

Sometimes the Next Big Thing is actually one of the oldest things in the book.

Many businesses today make the mistake of pumping out ads or content that appeal to a tiny section (or even smaller subsection) of their audience. They plaster social media with graphics, updates, pictures, and they tweet about their business while checking marketing boxes tailored to their budgets. They might utilize SEO or PPC ads; they might even do testing for their UX experience, or hire a demand expert to ensure customer acquisition and retention.

But many don’t go deeper. In fact, it’s likely most don’t.

Getting beyond the numbers on the page, the facts in the chart, and the various broad marketing and brand penetration reports takes a more dedicated approach that simultaneously cedes some control. I’ll explain what I mean in more detail below. But what I’m referring to here is called community, specifically a brand community.

If you’ve worked in digital marketing for any period of time, you know the field has more than its fair share of nonsense buzzwords and corporate speak meant to fill in for more nuanced or detailed thoughts (synergy, anyone?) Community and brand community can fall into this trap too if they aren’t treated correctly. It’s more complicated than just positive brand awareness or word of mouth; it isn’t just customer lock-in or retention or subscriber acquisition or good reviews on Google or increased profits or positive network effects.

In fact, it’s all of these…but they’re a symptom of something larger at work.

This isn’t meant to be fortune cookie-level dig deeper stuff. The truth is, community is something that can be built, but if it’s built correctly it isn’t controllable. If it’s organic, it can’t be fully steered. And if it’s fully functional, it works without buzzwords or huge marketing spends or reports of its success laid out neatly in a visually-pleasing chart (although I enjoy those, too).

Communities around a brand are dedicated customers who proselytize and become brand ambassadors to others. They carry on the mission of the company because they believe in it. They connect with others who share their goals and vision. They come together over the business’ core values and make them their own. They utilize elements of the brand when making their own purchasing decisions, and they let their perception of the brand influence how they feel about similar products and services. They’re loyal but not necessarily malleable. They’re fans but not just on social media. They love the product but feel the brand.

Building communities isn’t just a matter of pumping out good content and hoping people flock to it. It isn’t just hoping people laugh at an ad or feel emotion. It definitely isn’t coopting other content or user-generated material and making it worse. You want your core service or function to fill a genuine need in the customer’s life. You want that core need to be translatable into conversations and need-filling in people related to the customer. You want network effects based on an organic understanding of the brand’s benefits and how a larger picture can form around what they offer.

We’ve all seen the messianic and quasi-religious fervor associated with certain companies (Apple, Disney, Google, etc.). The goal isn’t to build a cult or an enclave of supporters with insular tendencies and views. The goal is to have an informed, educated audience who shares the facts of the brand with others and converts them based on the need. Reach beyond identities and demographics: don’t say things like “We have 18-25 year olds locked in for a product”—say more like “We’ve connected with young people because of our eco-friendly production chain.” No more Millennials are always on their phones, but more Millennials use new technology to connect more. You won’t build a successful new community without empathy for those different from yourself.

Get away from brand penetration in demographics based on the surface features of the brand. Think about how the product makes them feel, and how that product might make others feel—and this is the important distinction—when they hear about it from others, not you or your company. A genuine brand community takes over. This is why it isn’t controllable. You can run PR interference and try to course correct when public problems arise. But never forget that, despite utopian prognostications to the contrary, public opinion is not controllable and cannot be steered like a ship on a whim. At some point, people don’t want to hear from you about your service, they want to hear from their friend or their family member.

Some of the liveliest examples of brand communities include Harley Davidson; Disney, with its massive production slate of movies and its accompanying parks that offer a deeper brand experience and a connection to others based on fandom and nostalgia; Apple, of course, inspires brand fervor and loyalty like no other; Starbucks has pioneered what I call an omnipotent soft-touch approach, constantly available, all-knowing, and filling a (definite) need while being approachable and welcoming. Tesla has built a tremendously devoted following based on exciting new technology and a charismatic CEO; Peloton has gone back and forth on its brand communities, inspiring a devoted fanbase but struggling to expand it (its ads have also been criticized as tone-deaf and out of touch).

Netflix has a brand community based around binge-watching the latest shows and sharing a love of found content. Netflix also buys a great deal of foreign content, appealing to broader global fan bases and stretching themselves to different cultures. They use audience and viewing habits and patterns to create more content tailored to those groups. Their social media strategy then reinforces this content to their viewers, engaging actively on Twitter. People share their love of the company and its content across numerous disparate sites and feeds, and remix the brand into their own memes and content based on their viewing habits that relates them to others (“Netflix and chill”).

Managing communities successfully while juggling the needs of content (and the oft-criticized bottom line) can prove a distinct challenge. Netflix is also a great example of a loved company that also has had high-profile PR slipups, not least of which was the recent Dave Chappelle controversy. Netflix prides itself on its LGBTQ-friendly atmosphere and content appealing to younger, more liberal fans. While it has never been a mono-focused or singular-demographic-content company, it has struggled to find an acceptable balance in producing entertainment for all audiences, especially those niches who stand in stark political disagreement with one another. It remains to be seen how they’ll remake inroads to their transgender community fans after the dustup.

On the flip side, Patagonia did an excellent job fostering brand communities by building an environment-first strategy that laid bare their supply chain, manufacturing and sourcing processes, and how long coats should last. Transparency, expertise, and authority were on complete display for every part of the product. Patagonia recognized its community was based around core values of conservation and a green future. They successfully tapped into this and reinforced their fans’ belief in their company by being trustworthy and living up to their stated goals. Patagonia stood out from competitors in the natural way its customers harnessed the power of a company doing good to feed their own beliefs about a more eco-friendly future. And those communities were rewarded with great coats and a shared sense of mission.

Brand communities shouldn’t be thought of as a marketing strategy, but rather a business strategy encompassing all the company’s goals. Brand communities don’t just feed the bottom line or expand market share or help CEOs buy new cars—they are meant to serve the community itself, the customers, the people who interact with one another and who use the products that you make. Brand communities are often messy things, with uncontrollable thought leaders and influencers emerging organically from the community. It helps to embrace this; recognize influence and foster it. Encourage a community based on active participation and secondary thought leaders and structure arising from natural interactions (adhocracy).

If you’re from a political background, you know that community affiliations come in pools, webs, and hubs. Pools are composed of members united by shared values; web affiliations are based on strong one-to-one connections like on social media; and hubs unite themselves around a single individual. A good brand community utilizes all three, and sometimes bridges connections across types. The digital community builders are discovering that the physical world, with its messy contradictions and nebulous webs, can be made online and simulate a real world of customer interactions, and that the messiness should be retained rather than stifled.

What many brands can do to create communities is to branch out their digital presence and their platform. Democratize their processes. Use new technology to educate. Hold listening events with customers. Associate with similar brands and form partnerships based on organic sharing rather than strategic profit margins. Connect with companies that are unlike in product or service but similar in values and core beliefs (B corporations, for example, can form a web of like-minded certified companies that appeal to people collectively looking to mitigate their environmental impact and focused on the triple bottom line). Never underestimate the value of cooperativism and democratization of the brand.

When I say democratize the platform, what exactly does that mean? One of the simplest ways is to let in guest bloggers or invite community suggestions that are actually acted upon, if helpful. Make certain high-profile fans brand ambassadors, or let them guest tweet as the official account. Invite them and others to company tours; share stories, blogs, videos, and other projects with like-minded companies. Create an influence map, and see where organic interactions can spruce up challenge areas and can provide better content opportunities for online discovery. Open message boards or community forums; engage in chats about reviews on various social networks; create a robust email follow-up system that encourages loyalty and personalized touches. When guests post about you on social networks, engage with it on its own terms while letting it grow naturally. Don’t try to dominate or stifle conversations, no matter the tenor. Share, share, share. Discuss, listen, learn.

It can be scary for marketers, companies, and any C-suite officers to cede such control of the brand to communities like this. The first urge is to always dominate the brand conversation and try to control the message and its reception. Massive programs exist for content and semantic analysis to parse tweets, posts, and messages for every possible criticism and drawback in the hopes of shutting them down before they blossom. While this can be successful from a PR vantage point, there will always be something organic that is rewarded by an equally organic response. The key is to find an appropriate balance between control and democratization; between soft-touch and iron grip; and between a community and a customer base.

Each brand has to find their own balance to strike. But the rewards of an engaged brand community are potentially endless. The future of marketing is to foster communities based on shared values that triumph over buzzwords and sellable noise. The best ads are like the best interfaces: none at all. When people are encouraged to share instead of sell, the results are more positive, longer lasting, and simultaneously build a brand while building the community that supports it.?