When Does Building Community Around a Brand Make Sense?
Posted by anastasia on 07-21-2006
Since everyone has been slamming Wal-Mart this week for launching its "un-cool" HUB for teens, I thought I would weigh in with a different question. I actually think Wal-Mart's execution looks and feels Wal-Marty and I give their Web team (or agency) props for building such a feature-rich offering. I think the bigger question is why teens would want to join a community built around Wal-Mart. It's not a culty brand like Apple or Scion or Vespa. It doesn't stand for much with teens except for being a place to buy essential toiletries, underwear, etc. on the cheap. It doesn't even have the cool design vibe of Target. Given that teens (and human beings in general) tend to join or form online communities around either shared interests or because their friends are there (with cool features being a big plus but not essential), why would teens do this at Wal-Mart's web site? Even the "it's safe!" pitch may not work for parents who are mistrustful of their teens filling out profiles on what is basically an e-commerce site.
Maybe I'm wrong — supposedly millions of people went and played Coke's virtual reality game. When I mentioned this to the folks at Linden Labs, they seemed mystified by this. But on the otherhand, it's a game - I haven't played it, but maybe it's really fun and well designed. I would want to know how many regular players there are in MyCoke and whether or not a true community has taken hold.
Unless your brand or company either really stands for something - say Ben & Jerry's starts a social network around world peace or saving the environment, adding social networking features like profiles is just adding features for the sake of adding features. The last thing you want is an empty community. Remember, there is a big difference between small, passionate communities and empty communities.
Wal-Mart should take a cue from Macy's — I think THISISIT is actually a nice example of a retail brand building out a site for teens around what they have to offer. It doesn't ask you to make friends with other people when you're there, instead it gives you some entertaining/celeb content and most of all, cool ways to shop.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Having a brand-centered community is certainly one of the Holy Grails for marketers; the whole idea is enough to send near-orgasmic pulses of excitement through the brains of ad folks and product managers. But Anastasia is right to raise several of the essential skeptical (not meaning "negative", btw) questions we need to ask before convincing ourselves and our clients that this is a realistic brand-building strategy.
Ypulse being all about teen marketing, she naturally asks if the brand in question can hope to have the cachet of coolness that will make it an online (or real-world) gathering place for the hip and then, as sure as teens follow trends, those who wannabe hip. In broader terms, she is asking whether the intended "community" is likely to see the brand as a sufficiently charismatic and magnetic focal point to be a "community center".
She adds what is to me the killer question: even *if* enough of the target audience opts in to the brand-centered community, how can it hope to keep their attention in the form of, first, a desire to re-visit frequently, and, more importantly, the urge to tell their friends to go there, too?
And Anastasia adds the "ace": unless a brand cares about something worth caring about passionately, why would others ever feel compelled to become passionate about the brand?
To her list, I'll add the question of control: if the marketer sees the community as a means of managing the message, then it isn't going to last as a truly interactive, WOM-driven community, because it will quickly be perceived as a dictatorship, or simply an ill-conceived attempt at manipulation.
And let's remember what ought to be obvious to an experienced marketer: any brand that truly has achieved brand-hood is *already* the center of a natural, positive, self-building community, namely, the millions of loyal consumers who made it a brand in the first place! The community-building mission isn't to acquire new faces so much as to give all your existing customers a way to *share* their positives about your brand
These questions and points are worth posing about any brand, and by any marketer, but for us they are absolutely *vital*, because we have committed to developing an innovative "brand clustering" strategy for our new casual fashions company. Instead of banking on any one single brand-identity, hoping for an elusive marketing home-run, we're really building a machine that makes micro-brands, and then fulfills the customer expectations with maximum choice, speed, quality, and service performance.
We're fanatically targeted at intelligent women 20 and up, not at teens, but these questions still apply, especially the one on the "longevity potential" of the brand-centered community. We want brands that are finely tuned to the specific *interests* of very small niches of intelligent women, which the Web makes it possible for us to reach efficiently. We want customers who like our witty humor *first*, even if they are not quite ready to buy a sassy new t-shirt just yet.
Yes, we *hope* many of these customers will become missionaries for one or more of our focused-interest micro-brands, but we don't think it's realistic to expect any of our brands to be so compelling as to serve as a basis for a *sustainable* community of smart gals. Instead, we're designing brands that can become natural sponsors of *true* communities (of men as well as the smarter women they want to be with.)
Build appealing brands, and, by all means, use all the techniques of interactive marketing at your disposal to inform folks of your brand's zillion and one benefits. If the benefits are real, the "community" part will take care of itself.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Wow. What a great comment — I love how you translated my post into something marketers would understand. Not being in marketing myself (but being the director of an online community), I found the way you expressed my points to other marketers fascinating.
July 21st, 2006 at 4:34 pm
We've built a website around a brand at Victory Briefs Daily. I think the most difficult thing for us (outside of translating hits into sales or ads) is trying to guard against the cynicism that creeps when you do try to have your site make money. We really have to straddle the line of "making money" and "keeping it real."
Granted, we are the only site of its type and there was a pre-existing community. I believe to capture teens with these sites you need to go after things they already do… also where there exists some sort of "national circuit" - where lots of kids would naturally go and would naturally find others with similar interest. the thing about the debate community is that these kids, at least a lot of them, will meet each other at tournaments, summer institutes, etc.