Communities and brand building — A few thoughts
Communities and its different manifestations are having a profound impact on how brands are being built, how engagement and loyalty dynamics are playing out, and how the future consumer is created. The critics of this emerging dynamic may choose to ignore it, but brands who have long believed in going beyond a transactional arrangement with their buyers, have embraced this fast. Technology enabled community playgrounds have accelerated this dynamic and will continue to do so.
Without taking away the critical importance of traditional media and even TV, brand builders would need to increasingly focus on advertising spend inside community playgrounds, and in ways that revolutionise how advertising is created. Without adding to buzzwords, it is important to realise that traditional advertising creative briefing will have less relevance inside communities, where engagement and loyalty is created through active participation and creation of how the user wants to experience the brand.
Next stop — Corporate and institutional brand building, which is a bigger and more stoic mindset to break. Communities have already started to drive how product brands are being built, but that impact has not reached corporate branding.
How can organisations open up their mindset to understand how their internal and external stakeholder groups perceive, engage and want to shape the corporate brands they engage with? The next step would be for organisations to explore possibilities of investor communities or customer / vendor communities and employee communities? How many times do organisations actively try to understand what the corporate brand means to its stakeholders? Is it willing to take active feedback, allow deep involvement and richer discussions among stakeholders for brand building?
Human congregations are evolving and their impact on brand building is too. Currently this evolution is happening in congregations bonded by similar tastes, likes, ideologies, hobbies, passions, interests and preferences. As we move forward, this evolution should be fostered in congregations formed by commercial and operational interests. We would then slowly start realising a more profound impact.
