The opportunity in community

Local communities have been replaced by individual personal networks which brands can nurture, sustain and engage with

By Steve Smith, Starcom MediaVest Group

Communities are vital for our everyday lives, wellbeing, identities and needs. Through communities, we create shared emotional and social

connections with other people, they provide us with security and significance, and we use them for finding people and things such as jobs, partners, holiday locations and brands.

Yet, in the second decade of the 21st century, communities look very different from even 30 years ago. They have become centred less on neighbourhoods and more on our individual personal networks – our

‘personal communities’. Facebook, Twitter and the humble email have facilitated this change hugely.

Starcom MediaVest Group recently undertook an in-depth study of a nationally representative sample of 10,000 adults focusing on their conversations and community networks. Using this data, this article will provide an overview of communities and show some of the benefits to brands of intervening in and facilitating communities.

People have separate networks of ties that together form their personal communities. Networks a person might have include: family; co-workers; interest

groups; hobbyists; members of local or professional organisations; neighbours; and networks related to life stages and events. Friendships are likely to cut across many of these, although most people from different networks tend not to know each other.

People use their personal communities to help meet their needs. An applied version of Maslow’s hierarchy needs centres on security, adventure, knowledge acquisition, acceptance, expression, control and achievement (Institute for Management Excellence). Brand owners are able to facilitate these needs by acting as knowledge resources, aiding knowledge dissemination and acting as vehicles for people to come together. Waterstones has book clubs that meet at some of its stores; Pampers provides advice related to pre- and postnatal care, preparation for labour and delivery, nutrition, and healthcare procedures; and Mumsnet provides a forum for mums to discuss anything related to bringing up babies and children.

People’s needs, behaviours, interests and

identities change according to the network they are in at any one time. For example, what mums talk about with family members often differs from what they talk about at work, and what a students share with their university friends is often very different to what they share with their family. Brand owners need to understand these changes in order to plan for how and when they can be relevant to people.

While some people communicate regularly with a high proportion of people within their communities, others do not. This is a big change from when communities tended to be neighbourhood-based. For example, a study from Toronto back in 1999 found that among close communities of people in the city, only one-third of all possible connections were connected. Ten years later, this had declined by more than half, to just 13%.

Facebook is a good example of how large networks do not always equate with large proportions of active connections. A person may ‘friend’ someone else on Facebook, but rarely read their posts. A person may ‘like’ or post a positive comment on a brand’s Facebook page or content, but any impact of this upon other people will depend greatly upon how connected they are with people on Facebook, and how often they communicate with them. Online and offline, brand owners, therefore, need to identify and target people who are more connected and more influential within their communities. Our research shows that 66% of ABs regularly talk to ten or more people in at least one of their networks, compared with 57% of Ds. ABC1 25-34s are 1.3 times more likely to share content than the average adult.

Weak ties occur between people other than close family members and close friends – for example, in professional networks and interest groups. People who share weak ties may communicate regularly, but their relationships are not emotionally deep. People with extensive weak ties are important to brands because information and brand content have a likelihood to be shared across different networks. For example, if person A shares content with a weak tie, i.e. person B, it is likely to reach people who do not know person A. Conversely, if A and B share strong ties, then subsequent persons C, D and E are likely to already know person A and, therefore, already likely to

have received that content from person A. Facebook is a good method for seeding content because people’s Facebook friends are likely to include weak ties.

People sharing weak ties are also important to brands because they tend to be higher in social capital – contacts, knowledge, skills and other advantages a person has over another. So, students with large friendship networks are more likely to get better degrees than students with smaller networks, and people with more diverse social networks tend to earn more and are promoted more.

Brand owners need to engage with highly connected people because they tend to be more influential, knowledgeable about products, give more information about them, and communicate to many different people about products. When looking at ABC1s aged 25-34 who regularly communicate across seven or more networks, 41% frequently influence others (compared with 34% of all adults), 30% regularly have others come to them for advice about products (vs. 21%), and 41% talk to many different people about products (vs. 26%).

People who have been in a network for

longer are often useful for brands because they tend to be more influential within them than people who have been in them for only a short time. In so doing, they often form the core of that community and can act as gatekeepers for brands. For example, mums of children aged three to five years tend to talk more frequently about topics related to their children to other mums than parents of younger children, and influence them more. Forty-two per cent of mums with children aged three to five talk about child education, development and welfare at least weekly, compared with 32% of mums of children aged up to two years. Brand owners who want to target mums of very young children would therefore do well to also target mums of slightly older children who will have been in their mums communities for longer.

Newcomers to communities become ‘old-timers’ through increasing participation. Brand owners should look at newcomers to communities for inspiration, and investigate how people in communities become ‘old-timers’ in order to help brand owners intervene in them. In turn, brand owners can also enable newcomers to develop their learning and participation in the core interests of groups, and help existing members to build their capital within them. These might include youth tribes, in which members need to take on particular sensibilities, taste, style of dress and talking.

People have what anthropologists call ‘homophily’, which means ‘love for the same’. We intentionally seek out people and communities who are similar to us in terms of our interests, needs and experiences. So, people belonging to the same social class and age group tend to stick together. This means they tend to share similar conversations. People from social classes A and B are more likely to talk to each other about things such as the environment, education, activity holidays and athletics (in addition to the obvious financial-type conversations), while C2s are more likely to watch snooker and boxing, play computer games and do martial arts.

A consequence of homophily is that people look for brands that they believe are like them. This means brand owners need to understand people’s values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours up front, and connect them with the brand. If the brand were a person, what would his or her personality, passions and interests be?

“ A consequence of homophily is that people, including members of their personal communities, are likely to share similar self-identities, while differentiating themselves from others outside those circles”

Another consequence of homophily is that people, including members of their personal communities, are likely to share similar self-identities, while also often differentiating themselves from others outside those circles. This is especially the case with people in their teens and early twenties. For example, attitudes, interests and conversations of regular hip-hop listeners aged 18-24 are different from the average 18-24 year old and other adults. Fashion and desire to stand out in a crowd are far more likely to be important to them, and they are more likely to be first adopters, watch movies more frequently and read magazines.

The desire of many young people to belong and their desire to be different are two sides of the same coin. Marketers have tended to focus a little too much on the latter, whereas young people’s desire for belonging within their communities is probably stronger. By understanding how self-identity and differentiation are important to teens and people in their early twenties, brand owners can then help them to reinforce and communicate their identities to other people, such as by providing exclusive content through social media, that they can then share, for instance around music, clothes, photos, sports shoes, and vouchers to a concert. Nike, Red Bull, and Coca-Cola

are just a few examples of brands that do this on Facebook.

How people use social media in their everyday lives means that people’s networks are predominantly ‘always on’. Through social media, people communicate and maintain relationships across space and time, such as at work, at home, with friends and family, out shopping, on days out and while commuting. For example, 64% of 18-24s talk about TV programmes on Facebook or Twitter (vs. 43% of 25-44s and 40% of all adults), and 46% of mums who regularly talk about recipes and cooking do so via Facebook or Twitter (vs. 35% of all adults).

One of the implications of ‘always on’ for brands is that people expect to be able to communicate with them 24/7. This means that brand owners need to constantly monitor and respond to people via social media. This requires investment, but the benefits are likely to be high and not doing so will impact the brand negatively. This is because of the broadcast nature of social media use and how social media behaviour can significantly weaken the brand/customer relationship, for example when a poor customer service experience is shared online, and then reshared.

This analysis of communities is powerful for uncovering 10 opportunities for brand owners.

1 Brand owners need to understand the needs people try to meet through their

communities, and then think creatively about how they can provide solutions for this.

2 The diversity of any one individual’s personal community means brand owners

need to know how and when they can be relevant to people. This means understanding their routines and everyday behaviours.

3 Brand owners need to discover how they can strengthen ties between people, and

even become vehicles for people to come together out of a mutual interest.

4 Brand owners should target the most influential and connected people within

communities in order to create direct conversations with communities and use them as media to their communities; and to create indirect conversations.

5 They need to investigate experiences and activities of newcomers to help them

intervene in communities.

6 People are looking for brands like them. Brand owners need to make their brands

think and behave like people. Partnerships with media that have similar affinities to the brand and its target audience can be effective.

7 Communities are partly based on reciprocity. What can brand owners give

that has currency?

8 People’s communities are closely related to their identities, especially among under

25s. How can brand owners help people create and reinforce their identities within their communities?

9 People’s participation in communities shifts across life stages. Brand owners

need to deliver differently across them.

10 Communities tend to be ‘always on’. This means brand owners have to be

constantly available and need to know how often their community members want to be communicated to and using what content.

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This article was first published in Admap magazine February 2014 ©Warc www.warc.com/admap