A New Era of Community Building Needs a New Model

In the golden age of advertising, brands gained presence through mass media, where the “megaphone” allowed broad reach. Then, technology and data helped unlock personalization. Personalization shifted spending below the line to great short-term effect, but created privacy and cost-effectiveness challenges. Today, we have entered a new era in which further shifts in technology and consumer behaviors are making it possible for marketers to connect with consumers in their communities and generate much more emotional resonance. Many models are competing to define how to think about this new world, but one stands out: the community flywheel. Brands that have activated the community flywheel are putting community building at the core of their strategies. They go beyond merely building a social presence to building an actively engaged community. These brands achieve superior engagement levels with their customer base, which usually translates into higher conversion rates. How do they do it? Here are five ways marketers can set the flywheel in motion. Growing Your Brand Community Is One Thing. Serving It Is Everything Target the group, not just the individual Step one is to identify the communities in which a brand wants to earn the right to participate, whether it’s yoga enthusiasts in London or vegan parents everywhere. This is an evolution from targeting consumer segments, which are anchored in demographics or individual need states, to targeting communities of people who share similar interests and values. Brands need to truly understand their priority communities by gathering insights on, for example, why their members participate in them, how they feel about the brand’s products, what their unmet needs are, how they like to be spoken to and what drives them to purchase and where. For example, Gymshark’s target audience is not just 18- to 25-year-olds but those whose lives and community circles revolve around fitness. Gymshark efforts aim to meet this group’s needs—it has created a strong emotional tie with its community, as evidenced by the huge volume of user-generated content created by its community and consumers “hashjacking" the brand’s Instagram handle to get their post pulled into Gymshark feeds. Be laser focused on the buzzworthy Brands should focus their engagement efforts on a few distinctive products that are designed to create buzz. Having such “hero products” is a prerequisite, because without them, the online world can be confusing to consumers, who tire more easily of scrolling through online shops than they do of browsing in stores. The hero products often end up driving a material portion of sales, potentially 30% or more. For example, Crocs’ classic clog has been the company’s core focus for several decades. The brand has managed to maintain its relevance through frequent limited-distribution collaborations with, for example, Justin Bieber and Balenciaga. Be outspoken about brand values Brands will want to be outspoken about what they stand for and able to articulate why and how they live by these values. Just as the brand’s target community should be specific, brand stories should be targeted, reflect the language the community uses and be simple yet compelling enough that customers want to share them. Messaging may be provocative, tapping into deeply held ideals in specific communities. Drunk Elephant, for example, has built on its core brand story of “mompreneur” Tiffany Masterson embarking on a mission to create beauty products free of harmful ingredients. The brand sticks to and repeats this narrative and continues to create products that adhere to these values. Fuel the conversation Brands need to fuel conversations with a continual stream of exciting and engaging content that consumers and influencers can latch on to. Most companies use customer data to send email communications and, in best cases, personalize their digital media targeting and content. Brands have an opportunity to turn this around with test and learn; by understanding the natural paths that consumers take to experience brands and products, they can create community engagement plans that respond to those journeys. To achieve this, a community-centered operating model should be in place to allow ongoing community engagement and efficient management and monitoring of consumer and influencer activities. In particular, when engaging with a brand’s community, gauge feedback and ideas and be open to testing and trying new products based on those conversations—thereby making the community feel valued by the brand. Gymshark engages its community both online and offline. When first building its community, it organized influencer-heavy “world tours” to bring the community together, and it documented them with video on social to build brand awareness. It currently solicits online feedback from customers about what they like to wear when working out. Remove all friction Shoppers have very high expectations for a fast and frictionless transaction experience, but many retailers struggle at the last mile, experiencing high abandoned cart rates and lost sales. For instance, almost 70% of consumers say that page-load speed affects their willingness to buy a product online, yet 85% of sites fail the load standard of five seconds or less that Google says is required to avoid a high bounce rate. Many product pages are still overburdened and hard to navigate; Google has found that sessions that convert users have 38% fewer images than sessions that do not. New online shopping channels, such as social commerce, are upping the ante for frictionless experience even more. In our 2022 State of Fashion research, 37% of fashion executives cited social commerce as one of the top three themes that will have an impact on their business in 2022. As transaction presence will likely be required in new locations, such as the metaverse, the capability to adapt and quickly test new channels and options should be a core part of every conversion team. In all, the rise of digital and social channels has fundamentally changed how brands think about brand building, product development and marketing. In this environment, building long-term loyalty is both the greatest challenge and biggest opportunity that brands face. Activating a brand through the community flywheel enables brands to stand out, establish an emotional connection with the community and build the long-term loyalty needed to thrive in the digital era. How to Be a C-Suite Unifier