Posts Tagged ‘brand’

Seth Godin, Tribes and Brand Communities

May 12th, 2009

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGYr9bnktw]

Was watching this new inspiring TED talk by Seth Godin and remembered my earlier research about tribes and brand communities which are so important  in analysing the post-modern consumer behaviour . Here are some of the main concepts of tribes and brand communities reviewed in the research:

“In the post-modernity period which encourages a move away from individualism towards a search for more social bonds, these communities tend to reorganize themselves into neo-tribes, networks of people gathering homogeneously together for social interaction, often around consumption and brands (Simmons, 2008). From the marketers perspective it is very important to consider tribal relationships as it may be a powerful tool in building loyalty and trust among the consumers. Even though neo-tribes and brand communities are two different concepts they share very similar features and often are very related to each other. According to Cova and Cova (2002) the main differences are that the brand communities are explicitly commercial whereas tribes are not, furthermore, brand communities are concerned about relationship between brand and consumer, whereas tribes – relationship between consumers. Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) (citied in Ouwersloot and Odekerken-Schroeder, 2008) describes a brand community as a specialized, non-geographically bound community that is based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Mairinger (2008) suggests that:

  • The brand community is not just formed around a brand; it creates the brand.
  • The brand community is not just formed around a product; it is part of the product.

Therefore, the creation and development of brand communities is one of the most important tasks of the marketer as it can guarantee the company success in the long term. According to Mairinger (2008) brand communities can add real experiences and emotion to the brand, reach the long tail, address both individualism and collectivity needs and replace the celebrity endorsers with community brand advocates. Considering that 49 % of people made a purchase based on friends recommendations on social media property (Razorfish, 2008), social media can be viewed as an important channel and tool to interact, manage and enable these brand communities.”

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Posted in Community Management, Trends

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Social media "Evangelists" are the saint! Not?

March 5th, 2009

The resent blog by Forrester research “Sponsored Conversations: When it’s ok to pay bloggers to post” questions the legitimacy of social media enthusiast who become “brand evangelists”. The blogosphere itself created this name so it can follow its roots an answer this easy question (well, maybe not that easy). It is funny how many similarities you could find between the church preacher and social media enthusiast – both sharing their experience or the knowledge which is not easily accessible by other tribe members, and of course doing it for “Free”. Well, I believe by now everyone had to figure it out the sad true that there is nothing in this world for “Free”. Everyone is doing what their are doing with some intention – the church leader wants to become a Pope one day as a social media man wants to reach new highs in his environment, and well let be honest they are not doing it for “Free”. I have a good memory – every time being in the church i remember the men in black with the bowls secretly browsing through people asking for little donations. Well, they way I see it – everyone has to pay for the service, its completely normal and acceptable and the message send by the evangelist doesn’t become less important because I gave the money for it , especially knowing that the guy spend hours writing , figuring out  and creating the meaningful message, and the Time is Money, Isn’t It?. Having said that, I do understand that social media world works a bit different from the church and the message’s acceptance is affected by the reward, but I believe that it really depends from the nature of the reward (monetary or non –monetary ), the form of  the reward (sponsorship, wages and etc.) and relationship between “brand evangelist” and his/her community. Anyhow, speaking about the rewards my recent research (Social media effects on marketing communications) clearly identified that rewards don’t help to spread the message,

blogging-reasons

therefore, marketers should be concentrating on the quality and frequency of the content, rather than rewarding every single customer who speaks well about the company.

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Posted in Consumer Behavior

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