Community Values

It's not difficult to imagine a time when the most important marketing asset a company has is its community of customers.  What that community thinks of the company, its products, its management and its systems will be the number one defining factor in the company's reputation and brand.  Marketeers will be interested in systems, ideas, and techniques that can help them improve relationships with their community.  There will be a range of metrics used to assess community satisfaction and there will be a clear financial relationship between the community's health and the company's wealth.  Those metrics may even appear on the balance sheet as goodwill does today.  The word-of-mouth created by these communities will be the most powerful driver of sales.  Companies will spend considerable budgets trying to recruit people to their communities and will try and poach individuals who are active within competitors' communities. There won't be such a thing as a standard community.  Every company and brand will be able to create a version to suit the needs of its own customers and products. Moving from command-and-control to community values will involve some very painful reorganisation.

Comments

[Graham Hill]

James

I am not sure whether you are not getting a bit ahead of yourself.

Whilst communities are undoubtedly important and are likely to get more important over time as on-line/mobile connectness grows, the idea that a community of users will be the most powerful intangible asset that a company has smacks of wishful thinking.

There are a number of practical obstacles in the way of communitarian nirvana. Firstly, except in the maturity & decline stages of a product's lifecycle, the number of prospective or initial customers is likely to outnumber the number of actual customers. That makes 'traditional marketing' more important than social marketing to get the good word out, to encourage trial and start climbing up the diffusion curve. Secondly, communities form when customers are interested enough in a product to want to talk about it to each other. That may be so for some products, but the majority of customers are likely to be too busy getting on with life to be concerned with the ins-and-outs of say, cat food. Finally, The vast majority of conversations are currently off-line and likely to stay that way for the forseeable future. Whilst not impossible, it is much more difficult to develop a community off-line than on. And to monitor it effectively.

Whilst I am a keen fan of customer-driven communities, I believe that they are a part of the broad communications spectrum, not (and not likely in the near future) to become a dominant part of it.

But then I may be wrong.

Graham Hill

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Graham. No I think you are right and I would always go for a range of marketing activities over a single club. However, sometimes, I like to see if I can stretch the point to make a point - if you see what I mean ;-) That said I do think that community building will become a much, much more important part of the marketing mix in the coming years.