What is really a community? (Part 1)
Welcome to the 6th edition of the Direct-to-fan newsletter.
Summer it’s been a busy period, but we’ll make sure we hit your inboxes regularly moving forward.
Here you’ll find our thoughts on direct-to-fan brands and businesses, with a special focus on the sports and entertainment industry.
If you want to know more about D2F, you can visit our site or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.
All brands aspire to be loved. Beyond the utility they provide or the need they satisfy.
They want to transcend their actual products and services and have clients who care beyond those.
All brands aspire to matter. And cut paid media efforts because people come to them like bees to honey.
Be loved, transcend, matter… aka having a community.
All brands want to have one around. Not clients. Not users. But a bunch of folks who, like the pied piper in the Hamelin story, will follow the brand blindly to wherever they want to take them.
But let’s be honest. The big majority of brands don’t have one. And they will never have, no matter how hard they try.
A bunch of likes is not really a community
To begin with, in the last few years the concept of community when talking about brands and marketing has been misused. We talk about building communities, engaging with communities and so on too lightly.
The perverse dynamics of Social Media have been the catalyst for that: every brand with a few thousand followers and some interactions on Instagram has come to believe they have a community.
Well, sorry to be a pain but, in most cases they don’t. Followers on social media are not equal to a community. Most of them gave the brand a like back then and probably don’t even remember doing so.
They sure don’t see 98% of the brand’s posts, never engage with the 2% that the algorithm shows them off, and they follow another 40 brands, some of them are even the brand’s fiercest competitors.
If you ask them what will happen if that brand disappears, well… probably the answer will not make the Brand Manager happy.
Ok - then how do I know I have a community?
The dictionary says a community is: a group of people who are considered as a unit because of their common interests, social group, or nationality:
When talking about brands and organizations, we can consider we have a community when a group of people:
Believe in our mission, and…
Consider our brand as part of their identity and evangelize others, and…
Take action when the brand asks them to, without expecting anything in return.
If only one of these three elements fails, your community is probably non-existent or weak.
With sports & entertainment it’s a different story, as the relation is not transactional but passion-driven. But again, does that mean these brands automatically have a community? What are the implications of having one? How can we nurture ours to ensure it grows and flourishes?
Three basic categories
Interests are, basically, a spontaneous expression of everyone’s personality and therefore, brands have little to say about those. But they can become the cohesive force that brings people together around certain ideas, or even to make tangible a certain idea, interest or drive that couldn’t see the light before.
Also, digital communications have facilitated for niche groups to unite globally and reach a relevant scale that would have not been possible physically.
Let’s elaborate – to frame the discussion about brands and communities, we have to distinguish three basic community categories:
The spontaneous: stuff a group of people feels a passion about, with no direct participation from a brand or organization. This is the most genuine form of community and the origin of most of them. Sure there are brands around what’s going on in there, but none has been capable to act as a catalyst or a driver of the movement. Examples:
Fans of fishing.
Regular San Fermines attendants.
Fans of magic.
The unserved: the brand or organization acts as a catalyst for a group of people who have a spontaneous common interest in a certain topic, movement or lifestyle, but are lacking a reference or a cohesive force. It sometimes happens by design, after the brand identifies an opportunity or gap, and other times the brand emerges as the glue that brings all together spontaneously. These are brands that lead and build the culture of a movement that was somehow disorganized and chaotic. In Seth Godin’s words, they connect the tribe. Examples:
Urban Roosters: by gluing and expanding an already existing hip hop and freestyle community from the roots up.
We are Knitters: by becoming a digital reference of an already existing knitting fans community and significantly expanding the base, especially with youngsters.
Harley Davidson: with mature people that have an interest in experimenting freedom, adventure and just the right dose of rebellion. A good example of a brand that is in the middle of this category and the following one.
The self-igniters: the brand brings to life a movement that didn’t exist before, or in case it did, it didn’t know it existed, was non-defined or intangible. These new movements can appear due to the existence of new technology or a change in society. The brand creates a new category and becomes the absolute reference, building a movement around itself and potentially making the community disappear if the brand ceases to exist. This form of community is the most desirable scenario for a brand (or “love brand“), but at the same time an extremely difficult move, only reserved to exceptional products or services. Examples:
Airbnb: the digital nomad movement has been built around them, thanks to technology and the transformation in the way we work.
Ferrari: some may say this is a community of sports cars fans, but we all know that they are something different.
GoPro: they have created a community of adventurous content creators that simply couldn’t shoot their crazy stuff before.
Apple, Star Wars, etc.
With sports & entertainment brands, the three categories sort of combine and sometimes blur. There may be a spontaneous love for a specific sport, music genre, or simply your city/community – and an athlete, artist or club acts as a cohesive force to bring people with that same interest together. But they can also build a movement from scratch, attracting people who never felt the slightest bit of interest in that discipline or creating “new believers“.
What’s clear is that the movement is 100% dependent on that club, athlete or artist and it simply can’t exist under a different umbrella, as the members of the community establish a strong emotional connection with the brand (no frustrated Brand Managers here). It’s interesting to observe the differences between local and international communities around a club (or even an athlete or artist), as the socio-cultural attachment to the place someone belongs to plays a key role with locals that does not fly with internationals.
Will discuss this and more in a next edition of our newsletter. Stay tuned!