2

SUPPORTING ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS

This chapter articulates problems that brand communities often address for organizations and the ways communities support the organizations investing in them. The distinctions discussed here will help leaders recognize why and when to invest. If you’re already confident that your brand community does or will warrant attention and investment for meeting your organizational goals, then you may prefer to skip to part 2, where we jump right into discussing building a brand community from the beginning.

Successful brand communities address many ongoing challenges that brands face. The seven organizational goals discussed in this chapter and the deeper discussion in appendix A collectively address these challenges (inspired by personal communication with Scott Forgey and Bobby Scarnewman, September 2019).

RELEVANCE

• Revising stagnant product and services growth
• Innovating content for the marketplace and field
• Connecting new developments with customers
• Predicting market demand

TEAM

• Attracting the most talented and effective team
• Finding and recruiting critical talent with passion and purpose
• Inspiring collaboration among team members and partnership with both customers and colleagues

GROWTH

• Reducing customer turnover in dynamic and increasingly competitive marketplaces
• Getting the attention of the marketplace (“cutting through the noise”)
• Connecting the most important messages to the customers who need to hear them
• Creating fundamental shifts in industries and markets

The good news is that properly gathered brand communities can both dramatically and uniquely address these challenges. As we noted earlier, the seven most common ways that a brand community can serve an organization include enhancing and supporting the following goals:

Innovation: creating new value for stakeholders

Talent recruitment and retention: attracting and retaining the people your organization needs for success

Customer retention: keeping customers and stakeholders involved with the organization and providing value to the brand

Marketing: informing the market of offered value

Customer service: helping customers/users with the brand service or products

Advancing movements: creating a fundamental shift in the culture or business

Community forum: making the brand a destination for a specific community

If you don’t yet know how (or even if!) your brand community serves your organization, then start by focusing on only one organizational goal. Experiment there, and find what failures point you in the right direction. All the other goals will remain for you to grow into when you’re ready. Aiming for too many goals at once will only distract your efforts, and when some things fail—as they will—it will be much harder to discern what went wrong and how to correct it.

Each one of the organizational goals we’ve described refers to whole professional fields in and of themselves. Obviously this book is limited in the wisdom we can share here. You can find critical principles important to support each goal in appendix A: Brand Goals Practices.

Innovation

In this context, we define innovation as creating new value for stakeholders. In many fields, the demand for faster and richer innovation is so great that the only way leadership can know where to develop is by listening to stakeholders or customers. In fact, after surveying more than two thousand companies for their research, business scholars Tim Kastelle, Nilofer Merchant, and Martie-Louise Verreynne declare that “community and purpose are the new sources of advantage.”¹

Innovating from feedback is an impossible task if handled one email at a time. Many times, the importance of a brand community includes accessing and curating insightful ideas in a fast-changing marketplace.

Such innovation can address many areas, including improving customer experience, operational efficiency, or even design. To build a community to support innovation, leaders must pick a specific innovation area (e.g., customer experience or operational efficiency).

Innovation Areas

Consider focusing on one of the three areas described here. Confuse or conflate areas and you will confuse members and stakeholders.

NEW PRODUCTS OR SERVICES

Earlier we mentioned that worldwide beauty retailer Sephora hosts and manages a customer community called Beauty Insiders where members can discuss beauty topics even if those topics are unrelated to Sephora. The community conversations showed Sephora a specific market opportunity none of its competitors were filling.

Former Sephora head of community Shira Levine confirmed that “community conversations definitely influence product creation across Sephora” (personal communication, April 2019). Within scant years of starting the community, Sephora served as the exclusive launch retailer for the Fenty Beauty by Rihanna product lines, largely designed for women of color. The ninety new products launched included “shimmer” sticks that allowed dramatic highlighting for more skin tones. The line sold $140 million in its first forty days and was named by Time magazine as among the best inventions of the year.² The innovation has shifted the entire market.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Brand communities can improve how customers interact with a brand at any or even all stages in the customer journey.

Airbnb hosts summits around the world for its hosts so that those who choose to can grow as hosts in a supportive community. Access to the community helps Airbnb support them as the market and online platform constantly change. Airbnb company engineers have learned that it’s important to spend time with the host community because even in brief conversations, engineers and designers can learn what the most active members seek, and concept-test imagined improvements. This allows Airbnb’s teams to make faster and more relevant improvements than any competitor can.

INTERNAL COLLABORATION

Brand communities can improve the way work gets done.

Airbnb’s Louise Beryl told us (interview, July 2019) that staff noticed a growing conversation among Australian hosts. Many were seeking information on how to better host Chinese guests. The Australian market was shifting to more Chinese tourists, and their different preferences, customs, and expectations were a surprise to many members. Australian hosts suggested providing a wider variety of kitchen utensils and appliances to meet the needs of Chinese guests. Several Chinese guests and hosts applauded the thoughtfulness.

Louise noted two profound things worth celebrating for Airbnb. The first was that hosts, who were in some ways competing for guests, were also showing how much they were willing to ask for and offer help among members. The second was that these members helped the Airbnb team recognize that there was an opportunity to support and train hosts in the changing market.

Ways to Reduce Innovation Investment Risk

A brand community reduces innovation investment risk in three ways:

• A community already interested in and attentive to innovation development provides diverse perspectives, which highlight unknown or unpredicted opportunities, uses, and problems.

Both Sephora’s attention to unserved makeup demand and Airbnb’s discovery of Australian host challenges are fantastic examples of diverse perspectives highlighting something new.

• Community cocreation creates buy-in (i.e., reduces rejection of change). When stakeholders understand and feel connected to change, even see opportunities to inform change, they’re more willing to accept it.

You can recognize the importance of community buy-in most clearly when considering what happens when a brand launches an innovation without such buy-in. Digg was an online news-sharing and discussion platform with over thirty-five million users a month.³ In 2010, Digg launched a redesign without inviting member input. The changes included a new interface, story popularity algorithm, and user rating system. Within weeks, 34 percent of UK users and 25 percent of US users abandoned the site.⁴ Had Digg cooperated with even a small percentage of members in the redesign, the platform would have been much more likely to avoid the community abandonment. Some speculate that Digg might have grown into a household brand name. Instead, it was sold in 2012 for $500,000. Four years before, Google had reportedly offered $200 million.⁵ Ignoring the opportunity to innovate with community buy-in may have led the brand to lose over $199 million.

• A community can provide faster feedback for iteration. Designers get pertinent feedback from stakeholders familiar with the problem and interested in a solution.

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company with over 150,000 client companies, more than thirty thousand employees, and annual revenue of over $13 billion.⁶ Jennifer Sacks, Salesforce’s senior director of customer and market insights (personal communication, October 2019), explained that in the company’s early days, executives learned that they could never adequately understand what users wanted changed or redesigned simply by reading individual customer service tickets. In response to this issue, Salesforce created the IdeaExchange community, made up of customers.

IdeaExchange gives product developers ready access to those who understand how the product is used in the real world. Sacks says that over three thousand implemented features have been sourced from the community, helping Salesforce grow a fast-improving machine. (See more on innovation and Salesforce in appendix A.)

When stakeholders experience cocreation and brand responsiveness, they can grow more loyal to both the brand and the people involved. This loyalty is measured in customer retention and lifetime value. In other words, involving your brand community in innovation also strengthens many critical relationships.

Talent Recruitment and Retention

The term talent recruitment and retention refers to the efforts made by an organization to bring in people crucial for meeting organizational goals and to keep them involved. Talent can include employees, investors, vendors, volunteers, and collaborators. If you want these people to care about one another, then you want a strong brand community. We’ve heard about the profound difference this makes from employees at premiere brands including Patagonia, REI, and IDEO.

Every community needs to pay attention to member retention. This is nonnegotiable. Without attracting the right members and keeping them involved, no community can work.

When your staff and members feel seen, understood, and cared for, they’ll generate referrals that are important for your success. And, just as important: Highly skilled staff want to stay where they feel belonging, connection, and support. If you’re in an industry where competition can steal your best people at any time, then nurturing a community where they want to stay is crucially important and a gigantic competitive advantage.

Work engagement—employees’ participation at work—can be measured in terms of output. According to Gallup research, “85% of employees are not engaged or [are] actively disengaged at work. The economic consequences of this global ‘norm’ are approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity.”⁸

Yale researchers Emma Seppälä and Marissa King wrote in the Harvard Business Review that lonely people disengage, and this disengagement costs organizations in several ways, including “almost 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, 16% lower profitability, and a 65% lower share price over time.”⁹ This means that many executives have a lot to gain by helping teams connect more.

Seppälä and King write that 50 percent of people across professions and corporate hierarchies are burned out. This is a costly problem. Further, “50% of people say they are often or always exhausted due to work . . . [T]here is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion: The more people are exhausted, the lonelier they feel.”¹⁰ These authors suggest that exhaustion’s link to loneliness means that more human connection at work may be critical to addressing widespread burnout.

Leadership author David Burkus reports on recent research indicating that positive social relationships with coworkers may be the most important factor in work happiness and that having friends at work makes us far more productive.¹¹ Research firm Gallup found that “close work friendships boost employee satisfaction by 50% and [that] people with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to engage fully in their work” (emphasis added).¹²

Work friends help productivity by giving us people to approach for help when we need it and by sharing information through informal networks when formal systems work poorly or not at all. These may be reasons why belonging is connected to better retention, productivity, and well-being.¹³

The concept of belonging also takes the contemporary focus on diversity and inclusion to a higher level, helping employees go beyond “fitting in” (which, according to University of Texas social researcher Brené Brown, is “the opposite of belonging”) to feeling belonging as who they are, to their team and organization.¹⁴

Belonging doesn’t happen by accident. People create it intentionally, using a variety of soft skills, including listening, empathizing, and applying emotional intelligence. In short, when there is a context for community to grow, organizations experience incredible outcomes.

It seems obvious that when we feel connected to people at work, when we believe that we share values and that colleagues care about us, we will grow our engagement. It’s a shame so many managers never understand this.

Customer Retention

Customer retention means keeping customers who get value from the brand. If they ask to participate in the brand community, this almost always means that they already believe the brand can help them achieve or become what they aspire to. Participants believe they share some values with the brand, and participants want to grow in some way.

There are many ways to retain customers without community. Strong customer service, high-touch account management, and just plain better products are all worthy investments. An enriching community is just another offering (one difficult for others to copy) but not right for every brand.

Customers who only want a product or a service are not good candidates for a brand community. You want customers who want to grow, learn, contribute, and connect. For example, Harley-Davidson has invested internationally in forming HOGs. Why? Anyone with enough money can buy a motorcycle and take it out.

Members participate because some want to learn with, grow among, and contribute to others like them (Harley riders). In this way, the community offers additional value beyond the products. Harley-Davidson offers safety classes, scheduled rides with Harley owners, and access to more experienced long-distance riders.

Organizations can offer ways to grow and experience fun with four key principles:

• Active engagement. Active engagement means you’re inviting participants (customers) to experience something through membership (e.g., riding their motorcycles), as opposed to strictly passive engagement (receiving company announcements or watching videos of others riding). If your brand isn’t inviting participants to actually participate in something fun that helps them grow, then you almost certainly don’t have a true community.

We spoke with a San Francisco cultural arts institution executive who oversaw a performance series that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. The hope was that, after attracting many new visitors with the series, the institution would build a stronger support base for ongoing programming. The executive shared with us that, in retrospect, she now recognizes that there was no effort or investment to connect new visitors with one another or the institution staff. New audiences came for fun events, saw them, and then left with no relationship to develop. Without participation that builds community, all the new introductions turned into lost opportunities.

• Keeping the brand top of mind, but not making the brand priority 1 in all communication. All communication should offer value to customers that will help them grow further into who they want to be. They can do this without having to buy more product all the time. This is true for Harley riders, who can participate in HOG events without buying yet another motorcycle.

Many brand communities struggle with allowing competitors or disconnected brands to post in their community, and members to post about competitors. Both Sephora and Little Monsters confront this today. The wise choice is that these posts absolutely should be allowed if the information, opportunity, experience, or anything else helps members grow as they aspire.

Your brand and members live in a much larger ecosystem than your community. For example, Harley-Davidson riders obviously already know about other brands and part makers. Members feel connected and committed to brand communities because these communities help them grow. If you censor anything helpful but competitive, then you’re seeding distrust. When you show that you’ll support anything that will help members grow, your members’ trust, respect, and enthusiasm will increase because you demonstrate real commitment to their success beyond marketing manipulation.

You do need boundaries to ensure that participants are enriched by their experience and never distracted from what they seek. Competitors freely promoting products can distract from the community purpose. Consistent with keeping the inside safe, all spam and superficial marketing must be moderated so that the inside remains a place for enrichment and connection instead of a space mostly for marketing.

• Using shared experiences to grow trust. If customers don’t have access to shared experiences, they aren’t connecting often or well. Brands must offer events and spaces to encourage shared experiences that can build empathy and trust. (See the discussion of the campfire principle in part 3.) These experiences can take place in physical or digital space, ideally both. If there are too few shared experiences (or none), the community connections will stagnate or never form. For many brands, the lack of shared experiences means they only have mirage communities.

Etsy addressed this by offering daily “newbie chats” where new members were invited to digitally connect in a chat room with elders and the Etsy team. New users noticed that they were welcomed and introduced to community, the various segments, and to each other. Their new arrival was celebrated, and new sellers began to trust others who joined these chats (personal communication with Danielle Maveal, August 2019).

• Creating safety so that customers return to participate. If you want customers to keep returning, then the brand must ensure (as much as possible) that the space is safe for participants. If they are going to get teased, harassed, or hazed, the community will not succeed. We double-down on this point because even though it should be obvious, we’ve met several brand leaders who don’t understand it. They assume that a neutral stance—let participants “work it out”—is the best policy. If you do that, you’ll lose the people who want to participate but gave up because of the hassle.

There are many examples of brands doing a great job investing in making brand communities safe. Our favorite example: Harley-Davidson provides members with riding safety clinics, group-leader training to handle unruly members and legal challenges, and even insurance for the group rides. Even when its customers dress as the toughest people in their county, Harley-Davidson understands that making the events safe is critical for the company’s international success.

In another example, within the early Lady Gaga Little Monster’s fan community, moderators discovered that, without enforceable guidelines, some members got harassed and felt unsafe. Nude photographs and hateful comments showed up. This led to strict guidelines to foster a kind and compassionate space. Moderator Elena personally responded to every conduct flag even when they reached an average of twenty reported each hour. She and the volunteer moderators ensured that members felt safe enough to stay.

Marketing

Marketing refers to the efforts to inform the marketplace of the value offered by your brand. To understand how community and marketing work together, we must first understand a powerful principle: That “How can I build a community to sell more stuff?” is a community-destroying conversation starter.

It’s OK to sell stuff.

It’s OK to want to sell more.

It’s OK to reach out to people who want your stuff.

But if you’re building a community only to sell stuff, you’re at best building a mirage community. And you’ll look like a manipulative jerk.

This is because the relationship you have with someone as a customer and the relationship you have with that person as a community member, though not mutually exclusive, are distinctively different. Twitch, for example, has millions of customers who are also active community members.

Customers overwhelmingly seek a transactional relationship. As Twitch’s Bobby Scarnewman put it, “The relationship with community members and strict customers is totally different. When someone is only a customer, we’re constantly competing for their attention and dangling shiny objects to get it. Customers seek maximum value for minimum cost” (personal communication with Bobby Scarnewman, August 2019).

Community members return because they’re growing (progressing) in a way they want, and they seek to both connect and contribute to others on the journey. Bobby notes, “Community members seek to add value so that they can be seen as valuable by other members, and show others that they care.” In fact, in contrast to customers in a strict transactional relationship, community members can appear to outsiders to be contributing far more than they get. Their contribution can help them connect and grow, experiences they feel on the inside. This is the way that many of Twitch’s city group leaders relate to their community volunteering around the world.

The foundation of community building is always helping members grow into who they want to be.

If you’re a community builder with a marketing goal, ask questions like these:

How can we help people feel more connected (less isolated) in some way?

How can we help people grow toward what they want to be with others?

What kind of marketing opportunity would become available if we could do this?

The final point here is so important that we will risk repeating it in slightly different words:

You can market without building a community.

You can build community without selling stuff.

You cannot build a community only to sell stuff. The community will fail.

How, exactly, can a brand community support marketing without primarily focusing on selling? By following the watering hole principle.

Imagine you’re on a photo safari. If you’re trying to find rhinos, giraffes, and lions for great shots, you’ll soon learn that they all go to watering holes. They need water; watering holes have water. If you find the watering holes, you’ll find the wildlife.

So if you create a good watering hole, you’ll get access to wildlife. Wildlife return to watering holes because they get what they want, and water helps them survive another hot day and grow into mature animals. They do not come to pose for photographs.

If you forget the water element in your watering-hole strategy (because you focused on lighting and tripod arrangements), we can safely predict how well your photo safari is going to go.

Authentic brand communities, like watering holes, offer what visitors seek for their health, needs, and growth. The more you deliver enrichment, the more the wildlife comes. The bigger the watering hole, the more rhinos it will fit. Who doesn’t want to connect with the best watering hole?

At some point, rhinos will defend their favorite watering hole. This is similar to how community serves marketing. When we deliver enough connection and enrichment, then members will defend the watering hole we’ve created. It will become “their” watering hole, meaning they’ll feel ownership or entitlement. This can be a good thing when it’s helpful, and a challenge when it’s not. In a brand-building world, defending a watering hole ideally excludes aggression and violence. No matter how members show up, they’ll also connect with us whenever they return to “their” watering hole.

As an example, consider how Harley’s HOG members often defend the brand by responding to critics in person, on motorcycle forums, and in social media. This includes members defending Harley’s electric motorcycle investment choices.¹⁶ Former “HOG Captain” Robert Jones explained that in general, even when he feels critical of company decisions, he gives the brand the benefit of the doubt and remembers that Harley executives have a hard job (interview, October 2019). He gives Harley feedback and will defend the company because he’s a proud Harley rider and member. Robert has never seen Harley train members in how to advocate for Harley. The company doesn’t need to. Community pride fosters the protection.

Customer Service

Most organizations can, in principle, turn to their brand communities to have them help customers with the brand’s services or products. But most brands haven’t supported their nascent brand community enough to make it possible for members to provide as much support as they want to. In such cases, the customers feel mutual concern for one another, but do not have tools to offer meaningful support.

For clarity, customers help largely when there is an authentic community. We wince when thinking of brand leaders who claim they have a customer community when they really have a customer list.

When communities are well supported, the results can be stunning. Apple customers can get support twenty-four hours a day, every day, from other volunteer Apple customers. CRM software provider Salesforce’s products help support customer relationship management; the company has built the Trailblazer Community to help customers (whom they call “trailblazers”). Sephora’s Beauty Insiders community is a resource to any beauty product consumer seeking help, including appropriate product choices, on any day of the year.

When a brand community can support customers, the community provides three extraordinary brand benefits:

• It externalizes customer support costs. The community relieves the brand from having to staff a comprehensive help team for users everywhere at all times.
• It’s scalable. A community that supports an increasingly diverse user base can organically grow to serve emerging customer types.
• It provides an accessible touch point. The community offers customers an easy way to become more involved with the brand values and purpose.

Warning: Just expecting brand enthusiasts to show up and help won’t make that support happen. The product and brand must first grow compelling enough and important enough to customers that they want to support others with similar challenges and aspirations. As Joshua Zerkel, head of global community at project management software brand Asana put it, “The product must be truly loved.”¹⁷ If it isn’t loved yet, then that issue has to be addressed first.

Advancing Movements

Movements refer to brands that create a fundamental shift in our culture, political policies, or ways of doing business. Recent for-profit examples include Airbnb and Lyft. We also see political movement–oriented brand communities. The most famous social movements in the US all included brand communities, among them the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for civil rights advocacy, the National Woman Suffrage Association for women’s rights, and the Japanese American Citizens League for post–World War II internment reparations.

True movements can take years (often generations) to achieve their goals, so they need repeated engagement. This often means coordinating volunteer work, sending communications, and representing a cause with volunteers’ bodies (at rallies, protests, office visits, and the like). We wish it were obvious to more leaders that participants remain and return to movements over a long haul when they find connection, friendships, and shared identity there.

Although we can get nuanced and particular in parsing movement types, here we’re simply discussing any movements that bring together people who care about one another. Said differently, participants make friends and look out for one another as they invest in social change. Although a great deal of communication, promotion, and organizing takes place online, at the end of the day, every movement where forming community is important relies on an active “ground game”: real people meeting with one another, many times over. Repeated gathering builds the friendships that support participants through the hard work. The power and importance of these relationships is always the same.

Community Forum

Although brand communities are designed to serve members and brands, the primary purpose of some brands is to serve as a community forum. Certain conferences, summer camps, sports leagues, and professional associations can be described this way. All provide a space and context (digital or physical) for participants to connect and grow. Indeed, this is the primary purpose for these brands to exist.

Because of the very nature of what we call here “community forum” brands, all the principles discussed in this book apply to these organizations. We therefore will not dwell on how community serves this kind of brand because a strong community is existentially important to their success.

Before we move on, we can help leaders distinguish such brands. Let’s consider two brand examples: Reddit and Stack Overflow. These sites are both community forums.

Reddit is an online news aggregator and discussion platform that organizes niche communities around the world on one giant platform. It hosts over one million subcommunities.¹⁸ These segmented communities are interested in wide-ranging topics, from Zen meditation to cat ownership. Stack Overflow is an online platform that connects programmers from around the world. Both of these brands provide the spaces for interest-based communities to form. People had these interests before these communities existed, but finding similar others was difficult. These community forums bring people together as their raison d’etre. Both Reddit and Stack Overflow offer a place for niche (and growing) communities to connect for support and growth.

Online brands whose primary role is to provide a forum for connection do this at a scale that was historically impossible before the internet. Online brands are part of a technical development trend that democratizes tools for building online community.

Even within community forum brands, growth by itself does not necessarily mean community success. A large forum will fail if it does not provide a safe space and help members connect and meet goals. We’ve seen many brands conflate more people showing up or making a click visiting web pages with building a successful community. This typically happens when (accidentally) leaders focus on building a mirage community.