By Jones Mathew
Branding and products are at the heart of marketing. Products solve customer problems. Brands make customers feel good while their problems get solved. A great product is the most important building block of a marketer’s attempt to get into a consumer’s lifestyle. Without a great product, no amount of branding can help achieve long term success. Branding is about making a product (or the experience associated with the product) memorable to a customer.
To understand what branding beyond products can truly mean, let’s take a quick look at what brands are in the first place. Brands are abstract manifestations of a named product. Many brands are closely connected with the products they represent. For example, “Bose” means high fidelity sound systems and “Oberoi” represents high quality hospitality offerings. But then, brands can extend beyond a single product category. “Amul” means milk plus chocolates, desserts, juices, and so on. These are brand extensions. Thus, often the brand can go arching over multiple product categories. But at some point, a brand’s equity (how customers behave when they have to choose between a known and unknown brand – Bisleri versus Amma Water, for example) comes not from some physical product or intangible service. More importantly, it begins to revolve around feelings and emotions of customers. The Apple brand is far more than merely a set of snazzy products. A Harley Davidson biker experiences freedom as an emotion. These brands have been able to generate undying passion among its owners. Most consumer brands are unable to achieve this high level of emotional attachment called brand resonance -which is ‘active and intense loyalty’.
In a world replete with many choices for customers, achieving loyalty is not an easy task anymore. Marketers discovered another way into the hearts of customers and that pathway is the “brand community”. Brand communities are a virtual place, sometimes with physical dimensions too, where customers with emotional attachment to a brand can connect with other people having similar emotional connections with the brand can connect among themselves and also with the brand itself.
For branding to be effective through brand communities the first requirement is that the brand must be capable of offering more than its utilitarian offering. Brand communities are known for providing utilitarian as well as hedonistic need fulfilment of its participants. Brands should not be very aggressive when they create communities. Instead of hard sell, brands should master the art of soft sell. Brand managers managing brand communities must learn the skill of subtlety. Brand community participants should end up receiving a lot of help, tips and ideas on how the brand’s products can be used to go further than the basic needs fulfilled by the branded product. Harley Owners Group (HOG) for example is legendary in terms of the cruise ideas, motorcycle maintenance tips, and sense of belongingness that it generates. So also the Gang of Girls of Sunsilk shampoo. Brand communities are about engagement, connect and love for everything the brand does. Red Bull is another great example of intense participation by its members in its brand community.
What are the payouts of a strong brand community? Brands can beta test new products or even new features for existing products, crowdsource new product ideas to further the brand’s market share, check the level of emotional investment that its customers have with the brand, and so on. If managed well, brand communities can generate a very high level of brand loyalty, even among Generation Z customers, who are notoriously fickle in their brand preferences.
Further, since brand loyalty is not a single monolithic characteristic of a group of invested customers, brand communities can help customers progress from baseline loyalty to brand advocacy levels, which involves customers being actively involved in a brand’s existence.
Building brand communities is a painstaking and delicate task best not left to novices. It requires a deep understanding of what triggers loyalty and advocacy among a brand’s customers. It also requires the creation/discovery of a community and then nurturing it and facilitating its growth. A brand community manager should never take its long-standing members for granted. It should also not allow any one individual or small group to hijack the community. The challenge is also to get the passive members to become more active in giving valuable user related inputs and spreading the good word about your brand. Brand community managers must be present quietly to oversee the conversations and nudge gently toward the intended direction. For example, if sustainability is a major marketing plank for a brand, the brand community manager must wisely “seed” conversations around its sustainability related initiatives. If a brand is known for purity, then its community conversations must revolve around that attribute of the brand. Hence, it is a good idea to plant a brand community with clear community objectives to be achieved. Without a brand community plan, branding may become dissipated, unfocused and irrelevant.
Breaking away from the shackles of a product’s features, brand communities have the potential of helping customers discover and appreciate its intangible, emotional facets which fulfil higher order needs such as belongingness, achievement, savviness, self-fulfillment, self-discovery, self-transcendence, self-actualization, self-worth, group comfort, altruism and mavenism. Since brand communities came into being, they have proved to be an invaluable tool in the marketer’s toolkit to build emotional anchors in a choppy consumer ocean.
The author is professor, Great Lakes Institute of Management
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