Most Brand Communities Are Transactional - Own It!

TL:DR – Most brand communities are transactional. Members come when they want answers to questions and leave when they get them. They don’t want to engage with the brand or be connected to others. It’s time to focus our strategies on that.

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The Most Common Strategic Blunder

Here’s a common story.?

An organisation creates a community for members to share content, exchange ideas, and make connections.?

After a few months, the organisation isn’t getting the results it wanted, so it brings us in to help.?

We interview and survey members to understand their needs and desires.?

For example, here are the survey results from one client a few years ago.

I’ve collected over a dozen similar surveys just like this over the past decade.?

The answers vary from survey to survey (often in interesting ways), but the results are almost always the same.?

The vast majority of members want answers to questions more than anything else.?

In terms of member priorities, getting quick answers ranks highest, with everything else being a more distant second.?

This reflects a simple truth: The vast majority of communities (especially brand communities) are transactional. Members come to resolve problems, and they leave when they have found a solution.?

Very few members stick around to help others, and even fewer want to make friends, share resources, or get the latest news.?

If you doubt this, reflect on your own behavior in brand communities — how many do you choose to engage in proactively??

And if most members want this, we must embrace it – not fight against it.?

If You’re Managing A Transactional Community, Own It

We’ve worked with the Microsoft Answers team over the years (huge shout out to @dennispollett ). We spent some time conveying the right messaging (hint: it helps when ‘answers’ is in the community name).?

It’s clearly a transactional community. If you’re having an Excel problem, you don’t want to befriend other people with Excel problems or get the latest news about Excel – you want to find the answer and leave.?

Everything on the homepage is aligned to finding the answer.

This includes the name of the community, the messaging, and the supporting information all align.?

• Name: Microsoft Answers
• Tagline: Get answers from our community of experts
• CTA: Didn’t find an answer – ask a new question
• Supporting information: No.visitors, no. posts, avg. response time, no. people helped.?

There’s very little room for anyone internally or externally to misunderstand who the community is for and the value it provides. There’s no invitation to join the discussion or be a part of anything else – it’s a place to get help when you get stuck.?

Transactional communities are essentially ‘make the pain go away’ communities.

These are communities where people come to complete a specific task. The most common (by a long way) is to resolve a product problem. These communities are meant to provide a quicker and easier way for customers to find answers than existing channels. In exchange, it provides companies with an easier means to support customers at scale.?

Microsoft, like many organisations, are taking an activity which happens in one medium and deflecting it to another.?

This ‘deflection’ is also the primary means of measuring the community. How many people were deflected from one medium to this cheaper medium? This doesn’t just apply to people who ask questions (many of which are answered by paid answerers), but the volume of other people who will later see that answer and not have to ask it in any channel. That’s what’s most commonly measured here.?

The key thing to know is that most of this audience doesn’t want to be in this community. They would rather never have to visit it again. Outside of a handful of superusers, most members do not want to form relationships with one another.?

These communities are almost entirely centred around Q&A platforms. They are the easiest communities to launch because they satisfy an existing need rather than creating a new one. Often, they have no competition.?

This is precisely the benefit of a forum-centric platform. Each question creates a new page, which is indexed in search engines (and now consumed by LLMs). This helps future people with that question find the answer.?

This doesn’t mean all brand communities are transactional or you can’t support other needs members might have. But it does mean that if you’re trying to create anything other than a transactional community, you need a deep understanding of the challenges of that type of community.

Does Every Brand Community Need To Be Transactional?

You can see the overview of different types of communities below:

It’s easier to acquire members and launch transactional communities than any other type of community. You’re solving the existing needsof people right now. But once you build communities for interests, goals, and identity, launching these communities becomes a lot harder. You have to do much more persuading, which takes a lot longer.?

If you don’t spend time seriously thinking through the implications of these kinds of communities, you will struggle.?

But if you are clear about the nature of the community you’re launching (and the desire of members for that type of community), everything else becomes much easier to plan out.?

Let’s go through the other types of communities.?

Passion Communities

‘Let’s explore this topic together’

Passion-based communities are places where we spend our time because we are deeply engaged in the topic. We want to learn more about the subject and engage with others interested in it.?

These are moderately difficult to launch because of the level of competition. You’re unlikely to be launching the first community of its kind. This means you will be competing with larger rival communities that have a head start. How will you compete against them??

It will be difficult to get people to participate in your community – especially an enterprise community. People have an inherent bias against engaging in branded spaces. And if you make it unbranded, you might struggle to get the value you want from it.?

However, once they are up and running, they benefit from high member retention levels and tend to thrive at the 1k to 10k size. Almost every hobby will have a subreddit at this level (or above).

While members might form relationships with one another in this community, the majority will remain vague acquaintances, with increasing recognition for the most active members. It’s much easier to sponsor and engage within existing spaces than build and create your own.?

These days the majority of passion-oriented communities are centered around community-driven advocacy. This is where you help and support people to build and develop their own groups and followings.?

Key implications of creating a community around a ‘passion’.

• You probably can’t brand it.?
• Need a unique angle/positioning.
• You must support existing groups and nurture advocates to build their followings.?
• You need to make it fun and engaging.?
• Hard to prove the value of these communities.

Goal-Based Communities

‘Make me better at this’?

Goal-based communities are those where people join to improve at something specific, usually within several months rather than years.?

They often overlap with both transactional and interest-based communities. For example, if you want to improve your public speaking, you might join a group to help you do just that. You might also engage and participate in groups with your peers. They thrive when people share their stories (often to impress others) and key links from across the web.?

These are often private as much as public, enabling people to have discussions they can’t have anywhere else. People in these groups tend to form relationships and consider each other peers more than acquaintances. Most employee communities and communities of practice fit into this category. Many communities based around health and exercise also meet this criteria.

These communities are challenging to launch because they suffer from the ‘chicken and the egg’ problem. No one wants to be the first to share information – what’s the reward for speaking to a void? They usually require a founder with strong, personal relationships to get the right people in the room and motivated to engage. Or they require a high level of exclusivity to facilitate strong knowledge sharing.?

Key implications of creating a community around a goal

• Need a founder with strong, personal relationships to launch.?
• Communities take a long time to overcome the ‘chicken and the egg’ problem.
• Strong exclusivity and privacy often helps – but limits – the community’s ultimate size.?
• Hard to prevent these communities from being spammed by vendors.?
• Requires strong facilitation and a high signal-to-noise ratio (naturally limiting engagement).?

Identity-Based Communities

“These are my people”.?

These are communities in the truest sense of the word. They are when a group of people have developed relationships and mutual care for one another’s interests—often with shared traditions and mutual levels of ownership, etc…

Identity-based communities are the most potent and impactful communities people can experience. They affect people at the deepest level and give members a genuine sense of belonging.?

Communities of this kind are also the most difficult to create. You often either have to help members forge an entirely new sense of identity or find people who already have one and create the environment to bring them together. Facilitation is a critical skill in making these communities thrive.?

They’re also mainly unsuited to most enterprise activities. How often have you gathered in a brand-hosted environment and felt a sense of belonging? It happens at events – maybe – but far less so online.?

For brands, this primarily happens through dedicated MVP programs and bringing together a small group of influencers in a unique setting.?

Key implications of creating a community of belonging

• They will naturally be small.?
• Usually requires in-person meetups and hosted events.?
• Strong facilitation skills are critical.?
• Very hard to create these types of communities.

Do You Want High Impact or High Value?

One way of thinking about this is through the size/value continuum you see below:

The communities that would ultimately have life-changing value to members often do not deliver the most value to organisations. That’s because many communities have a natural size limit and are more directly connected to value.?

For example, imagine if you want to build a sense of belonging between members. That’s a noble goal. But there’s an inverse relationship between the size of the group and the ability to feel like you belong. This means you can’t simultaneously want the strongest sense of belonging and the highest number of members. Something has to give.?

Identity-based communities are clearly the most valuable communities to members, yet often the least value to organisations because of their distance to value and the likely size of the community.?

Transactional communities are typically the most valuable to enterprises, but least valuable to members. They solve a problem members have right now but that’s all they do.?

This highlights a central irony. The types of communities enterprises are most eager to build are often those least valuable to them. There are a lot of nuances and ‘yeah, buts’ here, but the principle is broadly true.?

Enterprises often dream of building a Salesforce-style community that brings their customers together, provides them with a powerful sense of community, and helps them achieve their career goals. But most customers just want to solve the problems they’re facing right now.

You Need Different Programs For Different Types

This raises the obvious question: Can you build hybrid communities that are transactional, goal-driven, and identity-based??

Yes, but you need a different program for each community ‘type’.?

The common mistake is trying to satisfy each community type with the same platform, team and methodology. It does happen, but it happens rarely. That’s because a platform that is good for one function (e.g., Q&A) is rarely the best for supporting other types. The needs are just different.

It’s almost impossible these days to have a passion-oriented community on the same platform you have a Q&A community.

Whenever you have a place where people can ask questions in a brand-hosted area, it inevitably becomes a support community.?

It’s far more common to have:?

• A Q&A experience for transactional needs.?
• A social media/third-party engagement to build an ecosystem of people interested in the topic.?
• A user-group program to facilitate in-person connections between people who want to improve how they use your products.?
• A brand advocacy program for belonging.?

In the past, you could have used the same platform for everything. But in the Community Everywhere era, you need different platforms for different experiences.

Summary

A few closing points.

1. Most brand communities are transactional. Members come to solve problems and leave when they have their solution.
2. If your brand community is transational, own it. Align both the messaging, platform decisions, and value calculation to it.?
3. Every type of community has pros and cons, be clear about them before deciding. The type of community will change everything else you do.?
4. Passion-based communities need an advocacy-based approach which supports and stimulates an ecosystem.?
5. Goal-based communities need a strong founder and exclusivity. These communities naturally tend to be smaller.?
6. Identity-based communities are smaller and deliver the most value. However, these communities are the hardest to nurture.?
7. Different communities require different programs. You can’t support each community type with a single platform or engagement effort.?

As expected, success comes from truly understanding your members. If you know their needs and preferences, it becomes a lot easier to build the right kind of strategy for them.?

And if you want help with your community strategy, drop us a line.

Good luck!