The topic of community came up with a client recently. Not community in the sense of place, but rather the idea of a group of like-minded people. Specifically customers.
And the question centred on whether clients can create both a sense of community and an actual customer community with existing customers in order to drive more business.
My client – in the technology/consumer goods space – is not likely to jump head first into community building right now. It is merely something under consideration. But I have worked with other clients heavily assessing or implementing community as a means of differentiating their offering and strengthening ties with their customers. My business has learned a lot about the concept of community and its application in business. Community can be a novel way of looking at growth strategy.
In conducting our research – a mix of secondary sources and interviews with academics and thought leaders on community building – we have identified some strong themes and commonalities with all communities. By categorizing and understanding all the fundamental elements of community, those elements can be recreated in the context of a business and its customers, with a goal of improving the revenue position. For example, an organized program can be built to aggregate customers into a company sponsored community, complete with membership numbers and information, and membership benefits.
The practical upshot of community creation for businesses is three-fold:
• Opportunities for positive word of mouth and brand ambassadorship by customers. Happy customers tend to spread the word.
• Improved customer dialogue leading to continuous product/service/experience improvement. It is easier to focus on the right improvements by keeping communication open with customers.
• Stickiness resulting in customer loyalty, and in turn retention and increased lifetime value of the customer. Customers who feel a sense of belonging will stick around and spend more in the long run.
In other words, acquire, maximize value, and retain. Isn't that the dream scenario for all businesses? So the question is not whether community building around customers is valuable, it is how to address the opportunity. It stars with understanding the many facets of community, and how to leverage each of them.
At the most fundamental level, we found four dimensions to the concept of community: membership, influence, integration and shared connection. Each can contribute to the design of a customer community.
Membership
The idea here is that a community is special and identifiable only if there are thresholds for membership. In a physical community, a member has to live within the geographic boundaries accepted by the group to qualify. In Leafs Nation, a strong community, a member has to openly declare devotion to Toronto's storied hockey team.
Membership determines who is part of the group and who is not. It defines boundaries, provides emotional safety, encourages personal investment and provides a sense of belonging. If we think about a typical business, the implication of membership could be that not all customers would automatically qualify to “become a member” of the company's community. The rewards of community membership could be reserved for customers meeting a certain purchase or behavioural threshold.
Influence
Influence is a two-way street in communities, where a member's sway over the community and the community's influence over a member take place simultaneously. Members are attracted to communities where they have some level of power, and at the same time communities push for members to conform. Without this balance, communities disintegrate or blow up.
In the case of Lululemon, its customers form a strong community, where members encourage one another to bring forward ideas and help shape a particular store's culture – but the community also demands that members conform in the manner in which they dress, and in how “far out” an idea can be. The self-regulation enables the company to stay out of the “you can” and “you can't” game for the most part.
