December 4, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

So yesterday I ended by posing this question:
What makes a brand community-able?

That is, I wonder what the qualities are of brands that inspire people to form collectives or communities around them?

I consider that we can actually think about some products that may have very low community-able characteristics but big community. I was thinking in particular of Tide detergent (which seems to be having a lot of price-based promotions lately, maybe indicating that their loyal base is eroding). Consumers love and are very loyal to Tide, as a detergent. But they sure don’t form communities based on Tide (unless they are paid to by firms like Communispace that will compensate them for forming synthetic brand communities). Tide’s just not that kind of product. And think about Snicker’s bars, or Kraft Cheese, or almost any other kind of consumer packages good (CPG) product. Hardly any of them (soft drinks and some other beverages are a big exception) have communities that form around them. That’s interesting.

Similarly, I think we see brands that can have a high community-ability (”communitability”?) but fairly low loyalty, if we consider loyalty followership or consumption that continues on into the long-term. I’m thinking of products of the entertainment industry. Say the show Lost, which was extremely popular in Season 1, seems to be such a show, and is losing ground fairly quickly, going from highs of 23 million viewers in the second season to lows of 11 million (less than half of the high) in the third season. There are numerous celebrity based examples, such as Martha Stewart or Britney Spears. They are very community-able, but not particularly loyal.

I offer a rough diagram here.

Harley-Davidson bikes clearly would have both aspects going for them, loyal consumers and a community-able brand. But consider the many products that don’t have either, like the commodity supermarket coffee market. Say Sanka, or Nescafe. No communities, and not much loyalty either.

So it seems that loyalty to a brand and it’s communityableness are orthogonal, they are independent characteristics.

That leads me to wonder more about what characteristics might make a brand community-able? For starters maybe we could consider five of the following dimensions of a brand being communityable:

• 1. Product category: maybe some product types are strongly experiential and communal (like motorcycles or cars or sports or rock concerts)
• 2. Look and Feel: characteristics of the product can evoke strong responses within particular communities that they might want to share with others, such as experiential design (like the Prada brands and store), retailing (like the service at Nordstrom), or even packaging (like the Red Envelope online gift store)
• 3. History of the brand: does it have deep local or lifestyle linkages of one kind or another?
  4. Subculturalization: did a subculture once take it into the fold and associate with it, thus communalizing it in grassroots fashion (as with the UK Mods appropriation of the Italian Vespa scooter in the 1960s, or the hippies appropriation of the VW Beetle)?
  5. Identity Contradiction-Resolution: did the brand (often due to advertising) help to resolve an important shared identity conflict (such as the current natural beauty Dove campaign drawing attention to female body image issues)?
  6. Made to Order Community: maybe some just have the community ingredient built right into the service or business model, like the YMCA, many non-profits, and of course Web 2.0 companies like eBay and Threadless

These are just initial thoughts, that I literally (I swear) wrote on the back of an envelope during a hockey practice. They await much further develop and research. I think this would be a fascinating topic for a Ph.D. student (one or more…it’s a big topic) or another scholar to pick up as an area well worth investigating. I’m going to continue to think about it more as well, and I’m interested, as always, in your thoughts. Don’t be shy.

Posted in Netnography, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding | 2 Comments »

December 3, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

It’s been too long since I posted to this blog. So I hope at least a few of you are still out there. I was busy with a fascinating project for a Fortune100 client that I am delighted to say went extremely well. And I’m currently at the NHH Business School in beautiful Bergen, Norway, the famous “Gateway to the Fjords.” Thanks to the invitation of my wonderful host, Prof. Ingeborg Kleppe, I’m teaching a Ph.D. level course on the topic of Consumer Communities, the online and offline manifestations. I’m enjoying my contact with students, who incorporate and blend a bunch of global influences, including Russian, Swedish, Italian, and Taiwanese, as well as Norse.

The topic of communities has been on my mind a lot lately, and I thought we had some amazing comments to my past few entries. If you haven’t read Greg Dunlop’s detailed and amazingly helpful comment, and Renan Wagner’s provocative and insighful thoughts, I highly recommend that you do so by clicking here and scrolling down to the comments section.

I wanted to add to this discussion by re-posing and rephrasing a simple question that someone recently asked to me at a corporate research summit:

What makes a brand community-able?

That is, what sort of a brand inspires people to form communities around? What qualities would lend a brand the legendary social significance and attractiveness that would lead to communally related “badging” activities? What would lead people to communicate deeply and meaningfully about a brand, as if it played an important role in their lives?

This isn’t the same thing as gaining so-called “emotional” or “iconic” brand status. It’s more like a cult or culty brand. It’s also related or parallel to one of the big questions in Word-of-Mouth marketing, which is what makes a brand WOMmable?  But it’s definitely not the same question.

I initially answered this question with another question.

I said that it was simply another way of asking what inspires deep loyalty and great devotion to any brand. Things like nostalgia, a powerful experience, the use of attractive and meaningful colors and symbolic vocabulary. Consumers fell in love with products, they garnered great enthusiasm, they were loyal, and they wanted to share this with others and so brand communities formed out of that. But then I thought about it some more.

And I’ll tell you exactly what I think about the topic. Tomorrow.

Posted in Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding | No Comments »

November 7, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

I’ve been a big fan of Facebook for quite some time as a user. I like SNS and think it offers consumers a valuable service that helps demonstrate the linking power of the Net and some of the innate and intimate possibilities of online communities. But I’ve always subjected any class discussions of SNS and Facebook in particular to an interrogation of their business model. After all, how do you monetize those 50 million plus users? It’s cool to see them sending messages and connecting, but what do you *do* with them? Advertising is a natural play.

Well, flush with Microsoft’s cash, Facebook just yesterday revealed a part of their grand business plan, which they call “social advertising.” You can read about the story here from the New York Times. I’ll quote that story a little bit here as a set up before providing my own opinion.

“Yesterday, in a twist on word-of-mouth marketing, Facebook began selling ads that display people’s profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased or registered an opinion about. For example, going forward, a Facebook user who rents a movie on Blockbuster.com will be asked if he would like to have his movie choice broadcast out to all his friends on Facebook. And those friends would have no choice but to receive that movie message, along with an ad from Blockbuster.”

They can call it “social advertising” but as the article infers, this is just tarted up word-of-mouth marketing. It’s not blazingly original, but there it is. One of the main problems I see with this execution is the issue that I see with all WOM marketing: it’s a different animal from “naturally occurring” WOM. We know a lot about “organic” WOM–still very little about the prompted variety. I suspect that it is received differently. Like other forms of social business, it does blur the increasingly blurry lines between social interaction and marketing-business-advertising moment. And I suspect consumers read it differently. And maybe start to read their “friends” differently. On Facebook, where a click also disconnects (yes, you know who you are, those who I’ve ‘defriended’), it remains to be seen how people will react to being barraged by a bunch of ads by their former pals.

Really, am I to assume that when you recommend a movie to me in person because you loved it, or even when you write in a email to me about a movie you just saw that you loved, that I’m going to treat that the same way that I would one of these tacked on ads in Facebook? It’s a decent empirical question.

Let me take a moment to look at Facebook from a netnographic perspective. From that perspective, I view the rise of online community as a social phenomenon but do so from the lens of marketing. Advertising is most certainly not the whole story, and is just the tip of the iceberg. Although it does have the implication to seriously dent the Titanic of online communal interaction. I do see a range of other interesting opportunities to use Facebook and SNS as marketing tools. And they are matched by just as many challenges. Some random thoughts I could easily expand upon in future:

1. Facebook is awash in marketing research and consumer data: big opportunities, especially when combined with Microsoft knowhow
2. If Facebook starts using consumer data profligately, odds are consumers will turn away (anyone remember the Windows 95 experience?)
3. Facebook is a very branded and corporate place already, in terms of its “Feel”
4. Gen Y and Millennials are only just so tolerant of corporatizing and commoditizing before they tune out the messages (and maybe the medium)
5. We still know very little about the way word of mouth as a “push” marketing form works (I have a major study underway, with three co-authors, that sheds some new light on this topic)
6. There are many ways for community to form, and SNS seems to be only one particular kind–how could it be combined in interesting ways with other forms of community, like virtual worlds, or blogs? We’re just beginning those explorations/exploitations
7. The Facebook experience seems to be fairly surface-level for the most part, but wide–not a lot of deep conversations on the publicly accessible level; lots of bite-sized comments (maybe this is ultrapostmodern life?)
8. Facebook’s corporatism hides some interesting anti-branding and anti-brand communities that are every bit as significant as the rah-rah recommendation engine idea
9. These are called “New Media” for a reason: the rules of the game are still being made up as we go…
10. What really comes after advertising? What is traditional advertising morphing into? Not just social advertising, but something truly different, and extensive, inclusive of all prior forms, but growing, reaching, broadening in scope. I think Google is moving around the edges of these ideas. I think Facebook may have many more ideas in this vein as well. These are certainly interesting times to be working in the realm of web2.0, online communities, and netnography. What do *you* see?

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Branding | No Comments »