What is really a community (part 2)
Welcome to the 7th edition of the Direct to fan newsletter.
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.
Welcome to our first newsletter of 2023. Yes, we have been pretty absent lately – but it’s been for a good cause. We have been doing actual stuff for clients and other projects we are cooking. A pretty hectic end of 2022 (more on where we are at D2F in our 1st year anniversary newsletter in February).
Spoiler for 2023: we will be much more active creating content. And no, it will not be ChatGPT doing it for us (although we have been playing with the thing and it’s tempting). More news about that soon. 🙂
Now let’s go back to where we left this.
In our previous newsletter we mentioned that, to have a community, a brand must have people around who:
Believe in its mission, and…
Consider the brand as part of their identity, and…
Take action when the brand asks them to, without expecting anything in return.
Summarized, this means the brand must Represent me, Define me and Move me.
The three are sine-qua non conditions.
Now let’s remind the three types of communities identified:
Spontaneous: feel a passion for something, no brands involved (fishing, San Fermines, magic, etc.)
Unserved: a brand or organization acting as a catalyst, connector or cohesive force around an existing movement or passion (Urban Roosters with hip-hop, Tattoox with tattoos, We Are Knitters with knitting, Harley Davidson with overlooked seniors with a rebel soul, etc.)
Self-ignited: the brand creates a movement that didn’t exist before, or at least it was non-defined or intangible (Apple, Vicio, GoPro, Star Wars, Airbnb, etc.).
Sure you now think — ok, this is great, but how on earth do I build a community around my brand? Or how I develop it, make it grow and, our favourite word: monetize?
From the bottom or the top
Before tackling this burning question, it’s key to distinguish between bottom-up and top-down communities, as it helps framing the dynamics and risks associated.
This distinction is key to understanding why some brands are obtaining real value from their communities and some others not (sports clubs being a good example of that).
Bottom-up communities (basically in the Spontaneous and Unserved categories mentioned above), are those created and driven by its members, with or without a cohesive force on top.
When there is no cohesive force, they use to be organized around informal micro-communities (friends, clubs, etc.). But have a close look at those groups if they are numerous enough — there could be opportunities to bring them together if a significant value is delivered.
Technology is a great enabler of that. Look at what Chess.com has done with the chess community. Were they unserved? Definitely not before the Internet came up — as it was an activity practiced within the family, friends or clubs. Chess.com has been able to build a 100 million member community who love their brand and consider them as a reference.
Here a great thread by @JoePompliano with some fascinating details:
For those bottom-up, unserved communities, the challenge will always be keeping the authenticity as micro-communities get connected. When acting as a cohesive force, it can be tempting for a brand or organization to own and control the community. But when that happens, someone will come out of nowhere and, eventually, replace that brand.
In the Chess.com case, they have delivered a tremendous value to a global community while keeping true to their spirit. Have they built a great business out of that? Of course, and that shouldn’t be a problem (audience + value = money).
The sacred throne
In the case of the top-down communities, mostly in the Self-ignited category, the dynamics are significantly different. The brand/organization is the reason the community exists, and somehow it acts as the reference point that determines the rules and defines the agenda.
Here, the risk for these brands is to establish a master-servant relation with their fanbase, addressing them from a sacred throne — eventually losing touch of what’s really going on down there. That could end up impacting the company’s ability to create culture and a movement around itself.
Another risk is becoming too big. Too mainstream. Everybody knows the relation with mainstream brands is less passionate than with the underdogs. Look at the passion Apple used to generate 10 years ago. The spark in the eyes of the so-called “fanboys“ has somehow diminished. Now Tesla is still pretending it is an underdog, but that will probably not last.
Some thought social media could finally secure a “direct relationship amongst equals“ between brands and fans, but it has actually done little in that direction. Same uni-directional “mass media“ message delivering dynamics than in the pre-Internet times.
This facilitates the rise of micro-communities (again, see a trend here? We do, but more on that in an upcoming post) — some of them becoming more influential than the brand itself. That’s what happens when you turn your fans into an unserved community (ehem!).
Fans not communities
We can see that very clearly with football clubs (for instance). They have significant fanbases, but too often are too scared to directly interact with them.
They prefer to have fans that adore them, not communities, afraid of the political and media implications of a misstep in that direct relation.
This is a common attitude in a legacy organization — and believe me, changing that culture is incredibly hard.
The result of that approach is good engagement on social media that can’t be transformed into mutually beneficial direct relationships that bring new opportunities for business value generation (such as proper membership programs).
Again, this brings opportunities for those clubs and franchises who are willing to innovate.
Are Web3 dynamics, such as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) or tokenized memberships a solution?
Maybe, but this is not about Technology. It’s about Culture.
The DNVB (Digital Native Vertical Brands) are a totally different story. Look at Vicio or the folks at Nude Project. They understood that since the beginning, making direct interaction and user generated content a pillar in their brand strategy.
The result are brands that are consistently building strong communities (even a culture!) around commoditized products. Chapeau!