Brand Community Strategies for Creating Value for Customers
Brand Community Strategies for Creating
Value for Customers
A brand community consists of a group of customers who share similar values, standards and culture while recognizing bonds of membership with each other and with the whole community.
Benefits of deploying a brand community systems include customer brand loyalty, positive brand image, reduced marketing spend (since brand message is passed on through WOM within the community), innovative products and services, and the likes.
But to sustain these intertwining relationships, the organization or brand should be perceived as adding genuine value to members of the customer community. For this in turn will tend to initiate the creation, delivery and exchange of value between members of the brand community.
So how does an organization create value in a brand community?
As you are aware, a value is a constellation of benefits the customer feels or thinks he’s getting from using a brand. Benefits may be either rational or emotional but the good brands deliver both.
To understand how brand communities create value for customers, however, it will be necessary to first establish that value creation tends to be stimulated by a set of value-creating practices. But these practices are supported by an anatomy (or structure) consisting of three parts:
1. Ground rules of engagement of community members- general information and expectation about the brand community; the ethos, values, and expected behaviours of members; the brand community promise – what you should expect from the community etc.
2. Demonstrable skills and abilities of members of the community – BMW stimulate the creativity of members through an ideas competition for telematics and online services as well as driver assistance systems of the future
3. Community engagements that serve to stimulate emotional commitment of members of the community
According to Schau, Muñiz Jr., & Arnould members of a brand community
Value for Customers
A brand community consists of a group of customers who share similar values, standards and culture while recognizing bonds of membership with each other and with the whole community.
Benefits of deploying a brand community systems include customer brand loyalty, positive brand image, reduced marketing spend (since brand message is passed on through WOM within the community), innovative products and services, and the likes.
But to sustain these intertwining relationships, the organization or brand should be perceived as adding genuine value to members of the customer community. For this in turn will tend to initiate the creation, delivery and exchange of value between members of the brand community.
So how does an organization create value in a brand community?
As you are aware, a value is a constellation of benefits the customer feels or thinks he’s getting from using a brand. Benefits may be either rational or emotional but the good brands deliver both.
To understand how brand communities create value for customers, however, it will be necessary to first establish that value creation tends to be stimulated by a set of value-creating practices. But these practices are supported by an anatomy (or structure) consisting of three parts:
1. Ground rules of engagement of community members- general information and expectation about the brand community; the ethos, values, and expected behaviours of members; the brand community promise – what you should expect from the community etc.
2. Demonstrable skills and abilities of members of the community – BMW stimulate the creativity of members through an ideas competition for telematics and online services as well as driver assistance systems of the future
3. Community engagements that serve to stimulate emotional commitment of members of the community
According to Schau, Muñiz Jr., & Arnould members of a brand community