Last week we looked what motivates customers to engage in an online brand community. If you haven’t already, go back and read that blog post here.

Continuing with our closer look at the paper titled Managing Brands and Customer Engagement in Online Brand Communities published in the Journal of Service Management, we’ll now examine the outcomes of engaging customers online.

The success of any business, be it online or brick and mortar, depends on customers trusting and returning to the brand.

Bill Gates has been quoted saying,

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”

So use the digital town square to build trust and commitment with your customers!

Simply having a website with your business’s information isn’t enough. I consider static websites to be the equivalent of a highway billboard in a deserted town. Sure, it can give your company exposure but that’s the end of it. A billboard or informational website won’t increase your customer’s satisfaction.

Instead, you need to have people in the digital town square to talk about your brand and your product. That is, you need to have people interact and be personally involved with your online brand community to humanize your brand.

There are many ways to do this, including group chats which is what RumbleTalk promotes, but today’s article is the outcomes of managing an online brand community.

Reading through the study’s section about outcomes, I pictured a cycle to describe the customer’s perspective and a spiral to describe the brand’s perspective.

Cycle of Customer Engagement

We all generally agree returning customers are essential to the success of a business.

Harnessing the power of online tools to build an online brand community can lead to happy and returning customers. This is how it works:

From a customer’s perspective, as discussed in my previous post, engaging in an online community occurs in order to gain something. For the sake of this example we’ll say the customer is trying to gain knowledge about the product.

When the customer’s expectations for gaining knowledge have been met (or if you’re doing it right, exceeded) their level of satisfaction with your product or brand is increased.

Increased satisfaction creates a higher sense of loyalty to the product or brand.

And this loyalty encourages future customer-brand engagement.

Because this loyal customer is now contributing more to your online brand community, the community as a whole now shares this customer’s perspective and insight which enriches the collective knowledge to generate higher satisfaction.

And the cycle continues increasing the quantity (and hopefully quality) of information about your product and strengthening the customer’s loyalty towards your brand.

The outcome for the online brand community, as observed by researches, is continuing participation, a sense of satisfaction for the customers, and greater trust and commitment to the brand.

Spiral of Growth

Returning customers are necessary, but let’s not forget that new customers also grow profits.

The spiral of outcomes for managing an online brand community begins with the same four steps included in the cycle. But rather than feeding back into a cycle the spiral illustrates the growth that occurs in the online brand community and consequently the business.

The process starts with engaging a customer online, the customer gains product knowledge, becomes satisfied with the product and brand, and the satisfaction increases brand loyalty.

Then, the customer increases engagement with the online brand community and this is where the cycle shifts outward to become a growing spiral.

The online brand community has more activity and engagement than previously which increases the amount of product knowledge to be gained. The value of the online brand community improves which amounts to greater trustworthiness among the online brand community.

When customers know they can trust the online brand community, their trust can be translated to commitment to the brand. This loyalty brings in more customers as the community members recommend the brand, and the brand’s reputation becomes known.

The outcome for the brand itself is higher brand commitment, spirited brand engagement, and brand satisfaction and loyalty, all of which give way to more and better customers.

Should you build an online brand community?

When your competitors are only a few clicks away from stealing away a paying customer, businesses should allocate resources towards building and engaging in an online brand community to enhance their customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Next week, I’ll be writing my final post regarding research of online brand communities. Want more now? You can read the full literature review here.

Growing up in a small rural town, the common interests of which to base my community were limited, circumstantial, and mostly geographic.

“We ride the same bus to school and have the same teacher? Wow, we have so much in common!”

But today, with the invention and dissemination of the Internet, people from all corners of the world are able to form communities based on whatever truly interests them and are no longer restricted by what geographically limits them.

Organizing niche online communities is a new frontier in business and marketing. The academic world is exploring and conducting research on this topic and the coming results are sure to give a better understanding of the phenomenon that so many of us are already participating in.

The Journal of Service Management published an article titled Managing Brands and Customer Engagement in Online Brand Communities. I found the article to be eye-opening and encourage anyone interested in working with online communities to read the full paper here.

Getting Started With Online Brand Communities

Brand communities existed before the advent of the Internet. These are communities formed by brand-customer engagement. You’ve probably participated in some level of a traditional brand community, be it as simple as a loyalty program at a movie theater or a sports car club.

Naturally, an online brand community occurs when that brand-customer engagement happens online. Social media made this abundantly possible and marketing teams have been more and more creative in using these tools to further their online brand communities.

To meet the needs of customers in this customer-brand online engagement, it is helpful to understand what drives a customer to engage in the first place.

The review of online brand community research found that there are three main “drivers” that push customers across the threshold from not engaging to being part of the online brand community. These are:

1. Brand-related Drivers
2. Social Drivers
3. Functional Drivers

Let’s take a closer look.

BRAND RELATED DRIVERS

There are two kinds of brand-related drivers; the first being brand identification or when a person has a personal identification with the brand. This is when your customer feels that your brand is part of who they are.

Think of a musician who would say “I play a Fender guitar and it is my passion and livelihood, it is who I am!” The musician is driven to participate in the Fender online brand community because it is a space with other passionate Fender enthusiasts to share and reaffirm their identity.

Then there is the brand’s symbolic function. A customer may be driven to engage with an online brand community if they believe in what the brand stands for. I personally am a fan of the Rubik’s Cube. It’s a symbol for logic and more broadly intellect.

In either brand-related driver, the motivation is within the customer because of their devotion to the product.

SOCIAL DRIVERS

When I lived in Washington, D.C., one of my favorite events was the National Book Festival. I was “driven” to attend the festival each year because of the social benefits.

There, I could browse recently published books and participate in the author’s Q&A session. Attendees would chat while waiting in signing lines which was a great place to get recommendations for similar books.

This, of course, was a traditional brand community (the brand being the National Book Festival) but the social drivers are the same for online brand communities as well.

Customers are motivated to engage with online brand communities to receive social benefits. In the example above these would be the exposure to new books, the Q&A session, and more book recommendations.

There’s also the social identity that comes along with participating in a brand community either on or offline. Customers who engage in your online brand community can be driven to receive the affirmation that they are part of a larger whole.

FUNCTIONAL DRIVERS

How many times have you seen an advertisement to get 10% off your next purchase just by “Liking” the companies Facebook page or following them on Twitter?

Have you ever logged into Microsoft’s support community for assistance in animating your power point presentation?

Did you spend time reading reviews of the last big product you purchased online?

All of these are examples of functional benefits that drive customers to engage with your online brand community. By offering something of value to your consumer, they are likely to engage and in turn contribute to the community with their insight and promotion of the product.

What is Driving YOUR Customers?

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

Before you ask something of your customers, ask yourself, or better yet, ask your customers, if they are driven to participate in your online brand community because of the brand-related drivers, social drivers or functional drivers, or maybe a little of each?

Understanding what is driving their engagement, will help you determine how you can better meet their needs.

Again, to read the full paper, Managing Brands and Customer Engagement in Online Brand Communities, click here. Or check back next week to read about the next section, outcomes.