How To Build A Brand Community (With Examples)

In recent years, we have seen a drastic change in brand marketing. Standard advertising campaigns no longer offer the benefits they once did. Customers want a connection. They want to know that the business they are investing in is genuine and human.

In response to this, many companies have transformed how they market themselves and subsequently started to assemble a brand community. This article will take you through all there is to know about building a brand community, alongside examples to ensure you fully grasp this contemporary concept.

What Is A Brand Community?

A brand community is a modern marketing strategy that can efficiently secure brand loyalty. This approach is driven by consumer emotions and invites an organic attachment to form between business and customer, in turn, promising loyal customers.

Many people assume that brand community and brand awareness are the same thing, but this is not the case. While brand communities do help to maintain brand awareness, they do not indefinitely revolve around it.

Just because an audience member is aware of your organisation's product/service does not mean that you follow its brand and are invested in its ongoing community. However, if a customer regularly engages with all your platforms and interacts with your content, then they are, by definition, one of your brand's community members.

A brand community essentially manifests a culture amongst your target audience that revolves around your entity. Building a community around your brand involves:

• Showcasing A Moral Responsibility: Communicating a clear sense of care and responsibility towards customers in order to demonstrate positive intentions and reinforce good morals to your customer base.

• Enforcing Traditions And Rituals: Brand rituals involve the habits and behaviours of your establishment. This intertwines the traditions of your brand into the lives of your community members, providing customers with a sense of resonance and belonging, which leads to customer loyalty.

• Developing Communal Consciousness: Communal consciousness plays an important role in customer retention. This element concerns the emotional connection between your brand and community members, as well as the relations members have with each other.

This conjointly works with the reinforcement of traditions and rituals, ensuring that your company can adequately maintain social connections throughout your brand's community.

Examples Of A Successful Brand Community

Now that you understand the definition of a brand community, it is worth familiarising yourself with some relevant case studies. Many modern beauty businesses have successfully adopted community engagement through creating a solid brand community space. Let's dive in and unveil which brands have achieved this.

Glossier

Glossier, a former beauty blog, has become one of the most sought after cosmetic brands in the beauty industry. They rapidly grew into a $1.8B (USD) company as a result of their pioneering utilisation of brand community.

Glossier constantly interacts with their community members across their official social media platforms, and even invites followers to actively engage with them through online polls, events, and competitions. This reinforces inclusivity, making customers feel seen and appreciated.

Glossier's most notable method of securing audience engagement, and fortifying a strong brand community, involves how they embrace influencers on social media. This brand incorporates user-generated content, a modern digital marketing method, through influencer endorsed advertising by uniquely turning their most loyal customers into brand representatives.

This demonstrates how Glossier values their audience and essentially rewards their community members with an exciting opportunity to become part of their team. They additionally use the tag #GlossierIRL on Instagram to encourage a regular circulation of user-generated content, resulting in communal consciousness between their customers.

Sephora

Sephora is a leading multinational cosmetic retailer that stocks over 340 brands and has their own exclusive line of beauty products. Sephora has been widely celebrated for its remarkable online brand community.

This brand advocates conversation amongst community members, and has launched their own forum, Beauty Insider, to fuel communication amongst users. Beauty Insider encourages individuals to share tips and product information.

This means that Sephora is ultimately utilising conversations as a tool to boost sales. For instance, a customer may connect with other users by suggesting a 'beauty hack' that involves a specific item on Sephora's site. This causes an organic process of product promotion, without any forceful endorsements.

By providing their customers with an exclusive platform, Sephora can coherently maintain a close-knit community and magnify audience engagement.

5 Steps That Will Help You Build Your Own Brand Community

If you are unsure of how to establish a successful brand community, don't worry! We have conscientiously curated these effective steps so that you can initiate your brand community on a strong foot.

1. Conduct A Brand Audit

Conducting a brand audit will allow you to understand your brand's strengths and weaknesses so that you can determine areas for improvement. 

Once you have thoroughly assessed your organisation, we advise that you create a plan to help you effectively improve your brand image and clearly convey your brand values to customers.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

By recognising what your target audience likes, you can optimise how well you connect with them. This is intrinsic to forging a strong community that consistently engages with your brand.

3. Establish Your Brands Social Media Platforms

An immensely effective measure of upholding engagement is by establishing an online community. The best way to do this is by forming a powerful social media presence. Forming a Facebook group, Twitter page and Instagram will facilitate community building and help your company to flourish.

When setting up your online platforms, be sure to consider user-generated content (USG). This is a superb tool (especially for beauty and lifestyle brands) which embraces modern commerce. USG will help reduce marketing costs by naturally expanding your brand community and effectively upholding audience engagement.

4. Utilise Alternative Ways Of Upholding Audience Engagement

In order to stand out from your competitors, and keep your brand community interested, explore unique avenues of audience engagement. There are several ways you can do this. Some of the most effective methods include:

• Setting up a rewards scheme

• Create a mailing list

• Regularly uploading blog posts to your website

• Founding an exclusive forum

• Producing multimedia content (videos, photos, animations, etc)

Before You Go...

We profoundly hope that this article has enlightened your mind to the wonders that a brand community can offer to your establishment.

At PicStudio, we offer a rich variety of dedicated services, specifically catered to fashion, lifestyle and beauty brands. If you are looking to further amplify your business' success, we kindly invite you to discover our boutique agency.