Camille Nicita, Managing Director North America & Managing Partner, Human8.
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In a year rich with a human desire for connection and a greater sense of belonging, "community" has emerged as a buzzword socially and professionally. According to our global research, people are seeking connections that enrich and energize them rather than consume them. But what does it mean to be a part of and foster a community beyond the people who surround you?
From a brand perspective, tapping into opportunities to listen to and understand the communities you serve helps forge stronger connections and create greater value by empathizing with consumers as humans. The definition of community calls for a feeling of fellowship—sharing common attitudes, interests and goals. When you tap into this notion, you can create space for creativity and more intimate, reciprocal relationships with the humans you serve.
Luckily, fostering a sense of community with customers is easy through online platforms. The communities you can create there are often referred to as "insight communities." When paired with a customer-centric strategy, an insight community can serve as your brand's operating system for listening, understanding and building your human-centric IQ. Not to mention that a well-nurtured customer insight community serves as a prominent customer experience touchpoint and fount for innovation.
Let's dive into the anatomy of an insight community and some actionable ways to tap into the collaborative magic and influence they hold.
The Anatomy Of A Brand's Community
When building an insight community, impact comes from both the collective and each contributor. Honor people as humans—remember, they're only consumers a fraction of the time. With this notion, realize that each person brings unique skills and competencies to the table.
To help put this into practice, let's apply the "90-9-1" principle to the anatomy of your community:
• 90% are everyday consumers: As "experts by experience," everyday consumers effortlessly share their frictions, needs and aspirations around experiences with your brand or category. Although they might not be able to envision how they want their needs fulfilled, they can vocalize what they do or don't like when they engage with a product or service and provide a window into their lifestyle beyond your category.
• 9% are leading-edge consumers: Being extremely passionate and enthusiastic about a particular theme or topic, these consumers are "experts by passion." Although they might be everyday consumers in other contexts, they're ahead of the game when it comes to their passions, allowing them to vocalize what's new and next in certain areas and push the boundaries of traditional thinking.
• 1% are creative consumers: Being disproportionately more likely to come up with original, outside-the-box ideas, they're experts through their hungry minds. These creative consumers possess unique skills to zoom out and inspire brands with fresh ideas.
Whether insight communities are new to you or you already have an established community, realizing the role that each person brings to the health and well-being of your community is an important step in creating a sense of belonging and a true community to attribute back to your brand.
Tapping Into The Power Of Community
Now that you understand the members within your community, the next step is to create a setting, in person or online, to serve as a conduit between community members and your brand itself. Here's a strong framework to ensure that your community is reaching its full potential:
• Cultivate: Establish an environment that honors people as humans and creates intrinsic value through connecting on a topic with other like-minded people. Creating a sense of fellowship and mutual respect is the name of the game.
• Listen: Listen to what the people within the community are saying and feeling. What do they want? What do they need? And most importantly, what are they looking to achieve? Thinking through the lens of human-centricity is essential to finding true insight and building the connective tissue that's indispensable to a community.
• Respond: Use your collaborative platform to share, communicate, and transparently and authentically connect to the insights you've gained through listening and engaging customers as brand stakeholders.
• Activate: Use deeper customer understanding as a launching point to build future customer-centric strategies. Communities enable brands to open change-making conversations and perspectives, and once you have the fuel to innovate, put the wheels in motion to drive change. The intrinsic motivation of being seen and feeling valued can have both tangible and intangible impacts on your brand.
Locking In Objectives
While online communities can be a great tool to understand and engage brand stakeholders, the opportunity for insights is endless, making it important to define goals and focus. To achieve their full value, it's critical to leverage communities by:
• Defining the vision: You can leverage community insights to remain relevant to ever-changing consumer needs—construct a vision and plan for the community that's purposeful, yet flexible, to evolve with the needs of the business and changing dynamics of consumers over time. Make sure your plan includes tactics that are inspired by or directly proposed by community members to resonate and drive success.
• Creating internal alignment: Once you have a plan, develop an adoption path to collaboratively align internal audiences. This involves defining the specific areas in which each internal stakeholder holds the power to create change, and providing tools to help them succeed.
• Building brand advocates: Using intentional messaging and actions through established communication and marketing materials, seek to align community members with new goals and enable them to feel like a part of—and truly committed to—your brand's success.
• Continuing connection: Drive connection and authenticity through focused facilitation to create collaborative learning spaces where diversity and inclusion are paramount. Empower community members to be themselves and foster unique connections.
The Takeaway
It's human nature to crave community—in households, in social circles and even through the brands we use. Consumers crave relationships far beyond transactions, and it's up to brands to foster ecosystems of connection. By harnessing the creative energy sparked within a community's reciprocal relationships, you can explore, layer and reframe different perspectives to gain meaningful insights to drive ever-relevant customer-centric strategies.
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