What Kind of Community Outreach Activities Does a Fashion Company Do
Reprint: R0904K Marketers in a variety of industries are trying to increment client loyalty, marketing efficiency, and brand actuality by building communities around their brands. Few companies, all the same, understand what make communities require and how they work. Drawing from their research as well equally their experience at Harley-Davidson, the authors dispel some common misconceptions about brand communities and offer design principles, cautionary tales, and new approaches to leveraging those communities. For instance, many managers remember of a make community in terms of marketing strategy. In fact, for a community to have the greatest impact, it must be framed as a corporate strategy. Realizing this, Harley-Davidson, for example, retooled every aspect of its system to back up building and maintaining its brand community and treated all community-related activities not just as marketing expenses but equally a companywide investment. Another common misconception is that a make community exists to serve the business organization. An constructive brand community exists to serve its members, who participate in order to fulfill many kinds of needs, such as building relationships, cultivating new interests, and contributing to society. Strong communities work to empathize people's needs and to engage participants by offering a diverseness of roles. Finally, managers often call back that a brand community must exist tightly controlled. In reality, a robust community defies managerial control. Effective make stewards can, nevertheless, create an environment in which a community can thrive—past, for example, designing multiple experiences that appeal to different audiences. The authors offer an online "Customs Readiness Inspect" that tin help you lot observe out if your system is upward to the chore of building a brand community.
The Idea in Brief
Hooray for make communities—those groups of ardent consumers organized around a make's lifestyle (think Harley-Davidson devotees and Playstation gamers). Make-community members buy more than, remain loyal, and reduce marketing costs through grassroots evangelism.
But many companies mismanage their brand communities because executives hold false beliefs about how to utilize these communities to create value. For example, they believe companies should tightly control such communities.
In truth, make communities generate more value when members control them—and when companies create atmospheric condition in which communities tin thrive. For instance, Vans—a skateboarding shoe manufacturer—had long invited lead users to co-design products, fostering a strong brand community every bit a effect. When privately owned skateboarding parks began closing, Vans supported its customs past opening its own park.
The Idea in Practice
Boosted truths nigh brand communities:
Brand community is a business—not a marketing—strategy.
Don't isolate your community-building efforts within your marketing function. Instead, ensure these efforts support businesswide goals by integrating them into your company's overall strategy. Instance:
Harley-Davidson reformulated its competitive strategy effectually brand customs. For case, all customs-outreach events are staffed by employees, non freelance contractors. Many employees become riders; many riders bring together the company.
Brand communities exist to serve their members' needs—not your business organisation.
Members have many community-related needs—including cultivating interests, expanding networks, and relaxing in a safe haven. Discern these needs, so assist customs members fulfill them. Example:
"Third Place" brands like Gold'south Gym and Starbucks tap into the need for social links by providing venues that foster personal interaction.
Stiff brands arise from the right community structure—not vice versa.
The strongest, well-nigh stable structure for a brand customs is a "web" whose affiliations are based on shut one-to-one connections. To cultivate webs, provide opportunities for members to forge many interpersonal links. Example:
The Harley-Davidson Museum fosters personal connections through programs like the Rivet Wall, where people order custom-engraved rivets that are installed on decorative walls around the museum campus. Visitors viewing their ain and others' rivets first chatting, often forging friendships.
Make communities thrive on conflict and contrast—not love.
Communities are inherently political: "In-groups" need "out-groups" against which to ascertain themselves. To strengthen group unity, create a sense of contrast, conflict, and boundaries. Example:
Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty brought "real women" (less-than-pretty, older, large, skinny) together worldwide to fight industry-imposed beauty ideals. The women formed in esprit around this mission.
Communities are strongest when all members—not simply opinion leaders—have roles.
In strong communities, everyone plays a value-adding part. Roles include the Mentor (shares expertise with other members), Greeter (welcomes new members), and Storyteller (disseminates the customs's history throughout the group).
To cultivate an enduring community, ensure that members tin can prefer new roles or switch roles as their lives change. Example:
Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, constantly monitors members' needs and creates new subgroups (such as personal financial planning) to continue people engaged.
Online social networks are only a tool—not your community strategy.
Many online interactions are shallow and transient, diluting the community overall. And so use online tools selectively to support your brand customs's needs. Example:
L'Oréal uses online tools (such every bit blogs) only with sure brands, such as mainstream Garnier, whose brand-community members value social interaction and view themselves every bit fighting for a improve world.
In 1983, Harley-Davidson faced extinction. Twenty-five years afterward, the company boasted a peak-50 global brand valued at $7.8 billion. Key to the company'south turnaround, and to its subsequent success, was Harley's commitment to building a brand community: a group of ardent consumers organized effectually the lifestyle, activities, and ethos of the brand.
Inspired by Harley'southward results and enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, marketers in industries from packaged goods to industrial equipment are busy trying to build communities effectually their own brands. Their timing is right. In today'southward turbulent world, people are hungry for a sense of connection; and in lean economical times, every visitor needs new means to practice more with what it already has. Unfortunately, although many firms aspire to the customer loyalty, marketing efficiency, and brand authenticity that stiff communities deliver, few sympathize what information technology takes to accomplish such benefits. Worse, nigh subscribe to serious misconceptions about what brand communities are and how they work.
On the basis of our combined 30 years of researching, building, and leveraging brand communities, nosotros identify and dispel seven ordinarily held myths most maximizing their value for a firm. For companies considering a community strategy, nosotros offer cautionary tales and design principles. For those with existing brand communities, we provide new approaches for increasing their impact. And as y'all'll encounter from our word and the online "Community Readiness Inspect," your conclusion is non whether a customs is right for your brand. Information technology'south whether you're willing to do what's needed to get a brand community right.
Myth #1
A brand community is a marketing strategy.
The Reality
A brand customs is a business concern strategy.
Too often, companies isolate their community-building efforts within the marketing role. That is a mistake. For a make community to yield maximum benefit, information technology must be framed every bit a high-level strategy supporting businesswide goals.
Harley-Davidson provides a quintessential example. Following the 1985 leveraged buyback that saved the visitor, management completely reformulated the competitive strategy and business model around a brand customs philosophy. Across just changing its marketing programs, Harley-Davidson retooled every attribute of its organization—from its culture to its operating procedures and governance structure—to bulldoze its community strategy.
Harley management recognized that the brand had developed every bit a community-based phenomenon. The "alliance" of riders, united past a shared ethos, offered Harley the ground for a strategic repositioning as the one motorcycle manufacturer that understood bikers on their own terms. To reinforce this community-axial positioning and solidify the connexion between the company and its customers, Harley staffed all community-outreach events with employees rather than hired hands. For employees, this regular, close contact with the people they served added such meaning to their work that the weekend outreach assignments routinely attracted more than volunteers than were needed. Many employees became riders, and many riders joined the visitor. Executives were required to spend time in the field with customers and bring their insights back to the business firm. This close-to-the-customer strategy was codification in Harley-Davidson'due south operating philosophy and reinforced during new-employee orientations. Decisions at all levels were grounded in the community perspective, and the company acknowledged the community every bit the rightful owner of the make.
Harley's community strategy was also supported past a radical organizational redesign. Functional silos were replaced with senior leadership teams sharing determination-making responsibility across three imperatives: Create Demand, Produce Product, and Provide Support. Further, the company established a stand-lone organization reporting directly to the president to formalize and nurture the company-community relationship through the Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) membership order. Every bit a result of this organizational construction, community-building activities were treated not solely as marketing expenses but as companywide, COO-backed investments in the success of the business organisation model.
Myth #2
A brand community exists to serve the business.
The Reality
A brand customs exists to serve the people in information technology.
Managers frequently forget that consumers are actually people, with many different needs, interests, and responsibilities. A community-based brand builds loyalty not past driving sales transactions just by helping people see their needs. Contrary to marketers' assumptions, however, the needs that brand communities can satisfy are non merely well-nigh gaining condition or trying on a new identity through brand affiliation. People participate in communities for a wide variety of reasons—to discover emotional back up and encouragement, to explore ways to contribute to the greater practiced, and to cultivate interests and skills, to name a few. For members, brand communities are a means to an terminate, not an end in themselves.
Outdoorseiten offers an farthermost instance of how the needs of a community can actually give rise to a brand. The European website outdoorseiten.internet originated every bit a venue where hiking and camping enthusiasts could exchange data nigh their shared lifestyle: Where is a proficient place to hike with children? Which shoes are best for rocky terrain? Members collaborated in order to gain access to the resource and skills they needed to reach their goals. Eventually, the community created its own Outdoorseiten brand of tents and backpacks. The customs'south brand grew not from a need to limited a shared identity merely from a desire to meet members' specialized needs.
Often, people are more than interested in the social links that come up from make affiliations than they are in the brands themselves. They join communities to build new relationships. Facebook provides a straightforward case, only country clubs and churches reveal similar dynamics. "Tertiary place" brands such as Gold's Gym and Starbucks tap into this past providing bricks-and-mortar venues that foster interaction. In such instances, brand loyalty is the advantage for coming together people's needs for community, not the impetus for the community to form.
People are more than interested in the social links that come from brand affiliations than in the brands themselves.
Robust communities are built non on brand reputation just on an agreement of members' lives. Pepperidge Farm learned this lesson when its initial customs effort—a website stocked with Goldfish-branded kids games—met with picayune success. Taking a footstep back from its make-centric execution to identify areas where kids and parents really needed help, the Goldfish team uncovered alarming statistics about depression and depression cocky-esteem among children. Partnering with psychologist Karen Reivich of the Positive Psychology Heart at the University of Pennsylvania, managers recently launched an online community, fishfulthinking.com, that repackages academic research almost failure, frustration, hopefulness, and emotional sensation into learning activities and give-and-take tools designed to help parents develop resiliency in their kids. Putting the brand second is tough for a marketer to do, but it'southward essential if a strong community is the goal.
Myth #3
Build the brand, and the community will follow.
The Reality
Engineer the community, and the brand volition exist strong.
Strategy consultancy Leap Associates has identified 3 basic forms of community amalgamation: pools, webs, and hubs (come across the exhibit "Three Forms of Community Affiliation"). Effective community strategies combine all iii in a mutually reinforcing arrangement.
People take stiff associations with a shared activeness or goal, or shared values, and loose associations with ane another.
The shared activity, goal, or values are the fundamental to this community affiliation.
Examples
- Apple enthusiasts
- Republicans or Democrats
- Ironman triathletes
People accept strong one-to-ane relationships with others who have similar or complementary needs.
Personal relationships are the key to this community amalgamation.
Examples
- Cancer Survivors Network
- Hash Firm Harriers
People have strong connections to a central figure and weaker associations with one another.
A charismatic figure is the central to this community affiliation.
Examples
- Deepak Chopra
- Hannah Montana
- Oprah
Members of pools are united past shared goals or values (remember Republicans, Democrats, or Apple tree devotees). Decades of make management theory take schooled managers in a pool-based approach to make building: Identify and consistently communicate a clear set of values that emotionally connect consumers with the make. Unfortunately, pools evangelize only limited customs benefits—people share a set of abstract beliefs but build few interpersonal relationships. Further, the common meaning that holds members together oftentimes becomes diluted if the brand attempts to grow. Unless the affiliation to a brand idea is supplemented with homo connections, community members are at risk of dropping out. The solution lies in using webs and hubs to strengthen and aggrandize the community.
Web affiliations are based on strong ane-to-i connections (think social networking sites or the Cancer Survivors Network). Webs are the strongest and most stable form of community because the people in them are bound past many and varied relationships. The Harley-Davidson Museum, for case, builds webs of interpersonal connections through features such equally walls around the campus decorated with big, custom-inscribed stainless-steel rivets deputed by individuals or groups. Equally museum visitors read the inscriptions on the rivets, they reflect on the stories and people backside them. People who meet at the rivet walls soon find themselves comparing interesting inscriptions, and before long they're engaged in conversation, planning to stay in touch on and perhaps even share a ride someday. Through rivet walls and other means of fostering interpersonal connections, the museum strengthens the Harley-Davidson brand puddle past building webs within it.
Members of hubs are united by their admiration of an individual (call up Deepak Chopra or Hannah Montana). The hub is a stiff albeit unstable form of community that often breaks autonomously once the fundamental effigy is no longer present. But hubs tin can help communities learn new members who hold similar values. Harley-Davidson, for instance, built a span to a younger audience through its association with professional person skateboarder and Harley enthusiast Heath Kirchart. Hubs tin can also be used to create or strengthen a brand pool, a strategy Nike has used since its inception past associating with stars such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. To build stable communities, hub connections must be bonded to the community through webs. With its Nike+ online community, which cultivates peer-to-peer support and interaction by encouraging members to claiming and trash-talk ane another, Nike has found a brand-appropriate way of creating webs to strengthen its puddle and hubs.
Myth #iv
Make communities should exist beloved-fests for true-blue brand advocates.
The Reality
Smart companies embrace the conflicts that make communities thrive.
Most companies prefer to avoid disharmonize. But communities are inherently political, and conflict is the norm. "In" groups need "out" groups against which to define themselves. PlayStation gamers dismiss Xbox. Apple enthusiasts detest Microsoft and Dell. Dunkin' Donuts coffee drinkers shun Starbucks. Dividing lines are fundamental even within communities, where perceived degrees of passion and loyalty separate the hard-cadre fans from the poseurs. Community is all about rivalries and lines drawn in the sand.
Dove's much-lauded "Campaign for Real Beauty" offers a vivid example of how companies can use disharmonize to their advantage. The entrada brought "real women" together worldwide to stand up against manufacture-imposed beauty ideals. Older women, large women, skinny women, and less-than-pretty women united in camaraderie against a common foe. Dove identified a latent "out" group and claimed it for its brand.
Firms tin reinforce rivalries directly or engage others to fan the flames. Pepsi, renowned for taking on rival Coca-Cola in the original Pepsi Claiming, is at present running advertising starring lackluster Coke drinkers in dingy retirement homes. Apple's PC-versus-Mac ads sparked not only Microsoft's "I am a PC" countercampaign merely also a host of YouTube parodies from both camps. A group'due south unity is strengthened when such conflicts and contrasts are brought to the fore.
Some companies make the mistake of attempting to smoothen things over. Porsche'south 2002 launch of the Cayenne SUV provides an instructive case in betoken. Owners of 911 models refused to accept the Cayenne as a "real" Porsche. They argued that information technology did not take the requisite racing heritage and painted Cayenne drivers as soccer moms who did not and could non sympathise the make. Dice-hard Porsche owners fifty-fifty banned Cayenne owners from rennlist.com, a site that started as a discussion board for Porsche enthusiasts and has grown to include pages devoted to Audi, BMW, and Lamborghini. The company attempted to mend the rift through a television campaign, complete with roaring engines at a metaphorical starting gate, aimed at demonstrating that the Cayenne was a genuine fellow member of the Porsche family. The entrenched community was non convinced. Positioning the Cayenne as a race car was "a stretch that only delusional Porsche marketers could perchance try—and a flat-out insult to every great Porsche sports car that has come before information technology," i person wrote on autoextremist.com. Smart managers know that singing effectually the campfire volition not force warring tribes to unite. Communities go stronger past highlighting, not erasing, the boundaries that ascertain them.
Myth #5
Opinion leaders build stiff communities.
The Reality
Communities are strongest when everyone plays a office.
Stance leaders and evangelists play important and well-documented roles in social networks. They spread data, influence decisions, and help new ideas gain traction. Simply whereas focusing on stance leaders may be sage advice for buzz campaigns, information technology is a misguided approach to community building. Robust communities establish cultural bedrock by enabling everyone to play a valuable part.
From our examination of research on communities including the Red Chapeau Society, Called-for Man, Trekkies, and MGB car clubs, we have identified eighteen social and cultural roles critical to customs part, preservation, and evolution (see the showroom "Mutual Customs Roles"). These include performers, supporters, mentors, learners, heroes, talent scouts, and historians, to name a few. In complementary research, Promise Schau of the University of Arizona and Eric Arnould of the Academy of Wyoming take documented xi value-cosmos practices among community members, including evangelizing, customizing, welcoming, badging, competing, and empathizing. Companies with existing communities can evaluate the roles and behaviors currently being demonstrated and identify gaps that could exist filled to improve community part. Those designing new communities can create structures and support systems to ensure the availability of a wide range of roles.
Recognizing that life changes often prompt people to reevaluate their affiliations, successful communities give members opportunities to take on new roles, alternate between roles, and negotiate tensions across roles in disharmonize—without e'er leaving the fold. Nonprofit communities are peculiarly good in this respect. Saddleback Church building of Orange Canton, California, maintains a cohesive community despite membership of over 20,000 by constantly monitoring individuals' needs and creating subgroups and roles to keep people engaged. Groups are organized not only by age, gender, and interests, merely as well by shared challenges, social commitments, and family situations. People are offered many types of roles, from agile to passive, in small groups and large, and can participate in person, past telephone, or online. Assorted print and digital tools aid people place options and map opportunities, so they can easily alter roles or try on new ones.
Myth #half dozen
Online social networks are the primal to a customs strategy.
The Reality
Online networks are just i tool, not a community strategy.
Forming an online community is frequently a genu-jerk reaction to the CEO'due south demand for a Web 2.0 strategy. Online social networks go lots of buzz, and given today'southward enabling technologies information technology seems silly to pass up opportunities in the virtual earth. Unfortunately, most visitor-sponsored online "communities" are nothing more than far-flung focus groups established in the hope that consumers will bond around the virtual suggestion box. At that place's aught incorrect with listening to customers, but this isn't a community strategy.
Online social networks can serve valuable customs functions. They aid people find rich solutions to ambiguous problems and serendipitous connections to people and ideas. Yet even a well-crafted networking site has limitations. The anonymity of spider web encounters often emboldens hating behavior, and the shallow, transient nature of many online interactions results in weak social bonds. And, lest we forget, a huge chunk of life still takes place off-line. Physical spaces play important roles in fostering community connections. According to Mark Rosenbaum of Northern Illinois University, communities that are developed in third places like gyms and coffee shops oftentimes provide social and emotional support equal to or stronger than family ties—a benefit that delivers price premiums of up to 20%.
Smart marketers apply online tools selectively to back up community needs. L'Oréal strikes the right remainder with its methodical approach. The company maps its brands along two dimensions: (1) brands of authority versus brands of chat, and (2) mainstream versus niche brands. Each cell in the grid suggests a different community approach. Brands of potency offer expert affiliation and advice. L'Oréal (the visitor'southward mainstream make of authority) builds customs through heavy TV advertising featuring celebrity spokespeople to inspire hub affiliations. La Roche-Posay (a niche brand of dominance) nurtures a worldwide community of dermatologists, both online and face-to-face, to expertly represent the make. Brands of conversation thrive on social interaction and engagement. Fifty'Oréal's Garnier (the company's mainstream make of conversation) enlists well-known bloggers to share what they're doing to make the world a better place, using these hub figures to strengthen the brand'southward puddle. Kiehl's (a niche make of conversation) uses a grassroots focus on local clemency sponsorships, in-store customer bulletin boards, and required employee volunteerism in the surrounding community to create the social glue. Although the tactics vary, the goal of L'Oréal's community-edifice strategies is always to connect with the people who make up the community in means that reaffirm the essence of the brand.
Myth #seven
Successful brand communities are tightly managed and controlled.
The Reality
Of and by the people, communities defy managerial control.
Excessive control has been the norm when information technology comes to community management. From Coca-Cola's pulling of its beloved soda off the shelves in 1985, to Microsoft's stifling of internal blogger Robert Scoble, to Hasbro'south suing of fans for publishing content based on its brands, community managers tend to put corporate interests over those of their customers.
Such efforts have led to vigorous debate most how much command to assert over brand communities. That is the wrong question. Make communities are not corporate assets, so command is an illusion. Just relinquishing control does not hateful abdicating responsibility. Effective brand stewards participate as community cocreators—nurturing and facilitating communities by creating the conditions in which they can thrive.
Vans, the famed maker of skateboarding shoes, has proved skilful at building community through support rather than control. From the beginning, the company recognized its fan base of customers as the owners of its brand. Its self-appointed role was to stay shut enough to the fans to understand where they were headed and so pursue the directions that would strengthen the customs. From its primeval days, Vans worked with pb users within each of its sports communities to codesign new products. When privately owned skate parks began closing, Vans took care of enthusiasts by opening its ain. Vans originally sponsored the Warped Tour, a traveling music festival appealing to young adults, equally a way to support its customers' love of music. Later, realizing that apprentice skateboarders were defective a national championship event, Vans persuaded Warped Tour organizers to add one to their lineup and then acquired the Tour outright once information technology became a major celebration of skateboarding and wheel motocross (BMX) culture. Warped Tour innovations now include air-conditioned "parental twenty-four hour period care" lounges at tour stops to go far easier for immature fans to attend, and an online customs that supports year-round connections amidst fans and helps far-flung friends coordinate tour omnipresence.
This commodity also appears in:
Companies build effective communities through a design philosophy that replaces control with a rest of construction and flexibility. Jump Associates has identified ix archetypal customs scripts that can be used as a framework for such design (encounter the exhibit "A Sampling of Community Scripts"). A script is a set of expected behaviors in a particular social situation. Call up, for example, of the script y'all'd follow for a date at a fancy eating house or a task interview in a CEO's part. Harley-Davidson offers a leading instance of how to use scripts to build and heighten community. The Harley-Davidson brand ethos of the "alliance" is grounded in the script of the Tribe, in which deep social connections form through shared experiences and traditions. Direction first reinforced this script to strengthen community identity and and so gradually introduced elements of new scripts to enrich the feel over time. The Harley Owners Group introduced elements of the Fort (an sectional place where insiders feel protected) through members-only events and special perks. Rallies and other recurring client gatherings added the Summer Camp (a periodic experience that reaffirms connections). Both the Harley-Davidson Museum and dealerships were designed to leverage elements of the Patio (a semiprivate place that facilitates in-depth, meaningful connections) and the Bar (a public space that grants reliable only shallow connections) to foster different types of interpersonal connections. By layering those additional scripts over the Tribe foundation, Harley-Davidson was able to build multiple community experiences that appealed to different audiences while retaining a cohesive core.
Whether through effective engagement, script-based pattern, or other means, smart companies ascertain the terms of their customs participation but discard their illusions of command.
Are Y'all Prepare?
Although whatever brand can benefit from a community strategy, not every company can pull it off. Executing community requires an organization-wide commitment and a willingness to work across functional boundaries. Information technology takes the boldness to reexamine everything from company values to organizational pattern. And it takes the fortitude to meet people on their ain terms, cede control, and take conflict as part of the package. Is your organization up to the task? To find out, take our online "Community Readiness Audit."
Community is a stiff strategy if it is approached with the correct mind-set and skills. A strong brand customs increases customer loyalty, lowers marketing costs, authenticates brand meanings, and yields an influx of ideas to abound the business. Through commitment, engagement, and support, companies can cultivate brand communities that evangelize powerful returns. When you get customs right, the benefits are irrefutable.
A version of this article appeared in the April 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review.
0 Response to "What Kind of Community Outreach Activities Does a Fashion Company Do"
Post a Comment