Brand community, a term said to have been coined by Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn, is formed around a branded good or service and in their words: “Like other communities, it is marked by a shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility different from other online communities.” In 2009, Mike Hall, founder of Hall & Partners, in an article on research-live.com/magazine discussed the meaning and purpose of brand communities, how they should be run, what the advantages are, etc., but other than that, brand communities have not been discussed much. Hence, I have decided to write a bit about our experience with brand communities.

Brand Community Vs. Facebook

Since Facebook is so widely used, major brands/ organisations set up their pages and use them as brand communities. What is surprising is that brands invest so much in a brand community on Facebook that yields negligible results. It is a fallacy to believe that a Facebook page is as good as a brand community. A leading food brand boasts a million users, but less than 0.001% of those are active members. There is a maximum of 15 unique members posting comments everyday on their Facebook page. A leading fitness brand boasts of 86,000 members with less than 2 being active on the page on a daily basis. Interestingly, most community members / brand enthusiasts who visit the Brand’s Facebook page merely like the page or mark it as a favorite, but don’t actually comment on it. A like on a Facebook page means little in terms of research data analysis.

For leading brands /large corporations, the impact of company created and managed brand communities is far greater than that of Facebook pages or Twitter and Instagram presence. Apart from the direct impact on the brand, the amount and quality of usable data, in terms of marketing research, that can be obtained from such self managed brand communities will be just as useful, if not more, as the data collected by conventional research methods. In terms of ROI a brand community will be far more economical than conventional marketing and research.

There are a few brands that have followed this path and launched their own brand communities and so far used them for marketing, brand advocacy, customer engagement and satisfaction. However, we at Market-i, believe that brand communities have a potential to do much more than just that. A brand community can be a powerful tool for market research; to run surveys, snap polls, forums, specialized groups, chats, ad tests and best of all, focus groups. A well organized brand community can have multiple benefits, which so far no community appears to have exploited. We have realized this especially after successfully launching our first completely in house developed brand community, Mcdonaldscommunity.com.

Future marketing and marketing research will, in all likelihood, rely heavily on online brand communities, so watch out for the next blog on running successful brand communities.