Active Brand Communities With A Successful Track Record

Imagine the impact of your customers engaging with you far beyond your brand and products, glued by a firm and intense connection and relationship of shared values, ideals, aspirations, and feelings. This is what a vibrant, loyal brand community means to your company and its business. It’s a community of customers who are invested in your brand yet go far beyond your product or service. 

A significant number of businesses worldwide, right from small companies to big corporations, have built or have been working on their online brand communities. These efforts enable brands to empower their customers, audience, and fans with robust and long-term connections. These brand ambassadors develop a sense of intense bonding and enduring values that transcend every barrier faced by the business.

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Typically, an efficient brand community building effort involves three steps:

• Creating a compelling reason for members to join
• Making the space smooth, homely, and valuable. Members must be able to connect and share their concerns, feelings, needs, aspirations, and knowledge with others.
• Making it worthwhile for the members to engage using the community

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Why should you build a strong brand community?

By varying degrees, most thriving brand community websites rely on three pillars—feedback, advocacy, and support. These ensure a set of values that defines the community’s impact on its target audience.

If built diligently, an online brand community enables your business to withstand even the toughest of times. Deeply engaged and interactive users of a branded online community deliver advantages like:

• Direct communication with customers to know them better. These interactions make it easier to offer great experiences.
• User conversations around your brand to get meaningful feedback. Your brand can evaluate ideas and make informed product decisions based on these interactions.
• Source of valuable user-generated content 
• Invaluable data and insights from quicker, less expensive market research
• Loyalty, advocacy, brand awareness, and positive sentiment via user engagement 
• Retention of users through memorable experiences and reliable support 

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Time-tested online brand communities 

Here is a quick list of online brand communities that have weathered the tests of time. These infallible brand advocates include:

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1. Harley Owners Group

A unique community for Harley-Davidson motorcycle enthusiasts, HOG stands for a way of life. Part of a worldwide culture, these aficionados share more than loyalty to the brand. This brand community has been built assiduously around a shared lifestyle, taste, and ethos by Harley-Davidson since the 1980s. HOG represents over one million active members who are passionate consumers of the brand to connect and engage online with great openness.

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2. Oiselle Volée

Oiselle’s online brand community, Oiselle Volée, offers valuable resources to its members—women runners. These users connect with their peers around the joy of running. During the pandemic, this community transformed from being just another online platform. For example, women runners could find tips or even a running partner. The community became a home-like space where they could chat their heart out with like-minded people over a cup of coffee.

3. Lego Ideas

A brand community with more than 1.8 million fans, Lego Ideas, is a case in point. It connects members using their love and joy of creating things with Lego products. Initially formed with Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL) in mind, Lego Ideas embraces people of all ages, whether five or 95. What favors membership is only the love for Lego (and parents’ consent for members aged below 14). This online brand community weaves pure magic with a spot where Lego enthusiasts meet, chat, and enter contests.

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4. Airbnb

The Airbnb host community thrives on an increasingly more reachable planet by offering homely environments anywhere. It enables people to bond, learn more about each other’s cultures, and become better hosts. Airbnb helps its hosts excel at hosting their guests with more than a mere traveling experience. It allows guests to feel and experience a foreign place “through the eyes of a local.” 

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5. Beauty Insider Community

Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community offers makeup devotees and skincare enthusiasts a fantastic experience. For example, users can share their latest photos, tips, and tricks. Or they can participate in fun contests and try out new products. Regardless of their experience level, users can be a member to connect with and learn from other members about cosmetics. This fascinatingly cohesive and immersive community experience drives conversational shopping.

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6. My Starbucks Idea

Starbucks has been synonymous with its community, My Starbucks Idea, because of the way it crafted the brand image. Starbucks continues to strengthen its community outside each cafe with a slew of social initiatives that take member interaction and engagement to the next level. For example, its volunteers match the service created to help community members engage with each other. Such initiatives assist even those outside the community.

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7. Roblox 

Roblox is a 150 million-strong super successful app and online gaming online brand community. It helps people build games and worlds, create avatars, and immerse themselves in virtual reality. Roblox is a basic-level movement that facilitates teams of people or individuals to build virtual items or games. Users can launch such content on the community platform. Members can also monetize their work, either through selling access or in-game purchases, or the top Roblox activities. The community has grown exponentially, despite being amazingly low-tech.

8. Charlie Hustle

Few niches connect people so instantly to form a strong community the way sports can. Rooting for a favorite team connects all die-hard fans to an emotional chord at once. Charlie Hustle leverages this winning edge to build its online brand community. The community shows that it does not need to connect members across the planet to be successful. Keeping it local has done wonders for the brand. What customers love the most is the community feeling imprinted on every sporty t-shirt.

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The Takeaway 

Getting a successful online brand community up and running demands dedication and persistence. Your team must be able to reexamine everything—right from organizational values to design. 

An online brand community can prove a magical strategy if approached with an organization-wide commitment to work across functional confines with the requisite skills. It boosts brand loyalty, cuts marketing costs, and unleashes ideas galore. Online communities grow business and increase ROI, even as it helps your brand survive tough times.

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