Marketing thought has strongly advocated differentiation of products and services as a means of achieving competitive advantage. As the Harvard Business School professor, the late Theodore Levitt argued quite early on – What companies sell is the claimed distinction of their execution, the efficiency of their transactions in their clients’ behalf, their responsiveness to inquires, the clarity and speed of their confirmations, and the like. In short the offered product is differentiated. Differentiation has been one of the corner stones of marketing. But, lifting of trade barriers between countries, integration of many emerging economies into the mainstream global economy, globalization, fragmentation of media, explosion of the Internet, and advancement of database collection technologies are some of the dominant factors that have rendered differentiation as it has traditionally been known ineffective for companies in the long run.

These developments have ushered in an era of empowered customer. As professor C. K. Prahalad says – customers have been increasingly engaging themselves in an active and explicit dialogue with manufacturers of products and services.

Individual consumers can address and learn about businesses either on their own or through the collective knowledge of other customers. Customers are fundamentally changing the dynamics of the marketplace. The market has become a forum in which consumers play an active role in creating and competing for value. Co-creation of value as a marketing concept is gaining ground rapidly. The emphasis on recognizing the centrality of customers in any business transaction or relationship is further fuelling marketing research and practice to search for marketing approaches that gives customers their due credit. In light of these developments, one of the alternatives that have been suggested to traditional differentiation and value creation has been differentiation on the basis of ownership and consumption. By enhancing the experiences that customers have with the multiple players that they interact with before, during and after their consumption, ownership and consumption can be effectively differentiated. Enhancing consumer experience, it has been argued, is effectively possible by creating communities around brands whereby consumers have an opportunity to experience consumption not only with the brand but with also other users of the brand in a community setting.

Building communities around brands to create and sustain excitement in the brand is catching up in corporate circles like a wild fire. The growing popularity and penetration of the Internet across the global has only added fuel to this fire. All of a sudden, creating communities around brands and involving customers actively is increasingly being seen as a magic mantra that can ensure corporate success. This article addresses this increasingly popular phenomenon of a brand community.

Brand community - An introduction

Brand community simply is a group of loyal brand customers who are bound together by their loyalty for the brand. Such a group is different from other groups in that a brand community shares not only the loyalty towards the brand but also some shared rituals and a sense of moral responsibility. As such, a brand community, it has been proposed by marketing researchers, is fundamentally based on three defining characteristics:

1. Consciousness of kind: Consciousness of kind refers to the intrinsic connections that members feel toward one another, and the collective sense of difference from others not in the community. It also refers to the sense of belongingness to an imagined community of people who share similar interests. Community members tend to identify themselves with others of similar ‘type’. Through the consumption of the brand, community members feel that they sort of know each other. In a brand community, consciousness of kind is due to the common thread that ties the community – the brand.
2. Existence of shared rituals and beliefs: One of the core components of any community is the existence of rituals and beliefs that are shared by all the community members and that are unique to the community. These rituals and beliefs are passed on through the members and they define the culture, character and conduct within the community. In a brand community, such rituals and traditions are predominantly related to the brand – the usage of the brand, the occasion of use of the brand, the associations with the brand, knowledge about the brand, willingness to participate in brand related activities and such. As such, in a brand community, the rituals and traditions are decided upon not just by the users of the brand (community members) but also the makers of the brand (the company). In creating rituals and traditions that would enhance the involvement and participation of the members with the brand, the company gains immense leverage to build loyalty early on during the usage life cycle of the brand.
3. Sense of moral responsibility: This refers to an inherent sense of duty that members of a community feel towards the community as a whole and towards other members individually. The members of a brand community are observed to share a sense of moral responsibility towards other members, which often manifest through activities that recruit new members and retain existing ones, and assists fellow members in the consumption of the brand, technical assistance and such. In a brand community, this sense of moral responsibility is created by the usage of the brand. The members of brand community would help others in realizing the full potential of the brand, share product knowledge, and also screen prospective members through their knowledge of the brand, passion towards the brand and the extent to which they identify with the community.

Steps for building a brand community

These three defining characteristics allow companies to actively involve with customers in creating resonating communities around their brands. Even though it is simple as a marketing concept, building brand communities that resonates with loyal customers is indeed a Herculean task. The following section proposes four essential steps in building brand communities.

1. Create a strong brand story/myth: Brands in today’s world are not mere inanimate ‘things’ but thriving entities with identities and personalities that allow customers to express themselves through its consumption. As such, to attract customers to it and to make them actively participate in varied branding activities, brands should have a strong story or myth that customers can easily identify and relate to. Such a story/myth would not only provide authenticity to the brands but also allow customers to express their sense of self through the consumption of the said brand.
2. Create a need for collaboration among consumers: For a community to be actively adopted by the customers, they should feel a need to connect with other members (customers) in the context of the brand’s consumption. Such a need to connect with other fellow brand users can arise for a number of reasons such as
   1. Sharing of information – Members of many video game communities, technical products communities become members in the first instance because such communities allows members to share information with others and to learn many technical details easily.
   2. Validation – Members of the Nike or Louis Vuitton brand community seek validation from fellow members about their choice of the brand, its usage situations and its superiority over other brands in the market
   3. To express one’s personality – Members of the Apple computer brand community feel a strong sense of expressing their unique personality by embracing Apple and rejecting the market leader Microsoft.
   4. Identify with a specific segment – Members of the Samsung brand community are part of the community because of their need to be identified as part of the global ‘cool’ segment that is in tune with the latest in technology and fashion.

   Therefore companies should decide the main reason for which they want to build communities around their brands in line with the segments that it wants to target.

3. Create identifiable brand elements: As with any community, brand communities should be able to offer its members unique identifiable community elements in terms of terminologies, icons, symbols and spokespersons. Such community elements would not only help the community to distinguish itself from others but also offers the community members tangible tools to identify themselves with the community. These community elements should be in line with the brand’s underlying identity.
4. Create a unique culture: One of the fundamental reasons for the growing popularity of brand communities is that it offers companies real time feedback about the brands. Further, brand communities allow companies to co-create value with customers on a continuous basis. As such, companies must create a culture that allows customers to interact with the brand, other users and the company simultaneously. Such an environment would allow customers to experience the brand in a memorable manner as they will be part of the value creation process.

The above mentioned four steps would assist a company in framing a robust structure to build a brand community. As with any business venture, the success of such a brand community depends on how proactively does the company engage customers on a continuous basis.

Conclusion

When managed properly, brand communities could prove to be that elusive new tool to tackle the ever growing competition. Brand communities not only allows companies to collaborate with customers in all phases of value creation – product design, pricing, places of availability, and phases of promotion – but also provides companies an effective platform on which to engage customers and create loyalty towards the brand. As the novelty of the concept begins to fade away, more and more companies would jump into the bandwagon. But the successful ones would be those communities that are built on strong fundamentals centered around the brand identity and that support the brand strategies.