Building Brand Communities by Carrie Melissa Jones

Author:Carrie Melissa Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Advocating for the Community

A successful brand community manager will advocate for members’ needs and vision to the ultimate brand leadership.

Leaders who don’t listen or don’t want to listen to their brand community’s needs and vision typically prefer an exploitative and extractive relationship with members. When members recognize this, the community’s power to deliver value both to the brand and to its members will almost certainly erode—in a catastrophic and spectacular way. Remember that influencing the brand is one value that members seek when they get involved at all.

You can think of the community work as building a trust bank. You may build a high balance with years of service and demonstrated commitment. Refusing to listen to members will deplete the bank balance quickly. Constant listening, cocreating, and delivering on promises will increase the balance.

Airbnb has learned this lesson firsthand. Many Airbnb hosts were frustrated with the original method customers used to rate hosts. At an Airbnb-sponsored gathering, a company product manager sought direct feedback in person and discovered previously unheard frustration. One of the lessons he learned was that the then online feedback system didn’t give users adequate tools to provide deep, nuanced, and contextualized feedback. Airbnb now regularly and formally invites product developers to join user events because the brand knows it can discover more hidden opportunities (personal communication, Danielle Maveal, August 2019).

Of course, not all voices in a brand community are either equal or helpful. It’s OK to choose whom you listen to. You can filter using any criteria appropriate for your brand.

Airbnb serves well over two million hosts. Not every one of them sits down with developers. The brand invests a lot to invite the most successful hosts to share how the Airbnb platform can better serve them. The wisdom here is not that you must take time to listen to every member all the time, or design by committee. The lesson is that there must be a way that membership can contact brand management in a meaningful way to build and protect trust.

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