Study reveals that branded communities generally are a failure
Jupiter Research published a study saying that branded communities are a failure and don’t reach their consumers. As stated in Internetworld and Acquisa the average number of members of branded communities in Europe are 6,494 members with more than have half of the communities only counting 1,000 members in comparison to the investments sometimes going far beyond EUR 100,000. Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users. They try to just give information to the members instead of making the effort of understanding their consumers and providing them with interaction possibilities or even reasons to communicate. According to a report by David Eicher, CEO of the internet agency Robert & Horst, one just needs to merely be smart and integrate the users at the beginning of the development of the community instead of creating an expensive “community platform” and then looking for members. That sounds easy! What do you think?
Tags: Marketing, brand, communities, jupiter research
July 8th, 2008 at 3:43 am
When you put it this way it got me thinking and i put the question back on you. How do you get the crowd involved during the early stages of the sites development? Do you rely on an existing platform with a proven crowd then get them to feed you ideas which i dont see working real effectively or being able to involve a large crowd. The alternative is to develop your own platform then during beta testing you get feedback from the users and take on board and reccomendation? In my opinion a platform needs to be developed by people who know what the want and know that other people will be easily able to identify the benefits of being part of a certain community.
Once you start expanding you need to use an ongoing iterative/ feedback orientated approach to improving the platform which appeals to more people. Creating a “me too” platform will always only attract limited numbers of people unless they are geting something out of it.
At the end of the day, Dare to be different and push for what you believe in.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Hello Brad,
what you are saying is right and I agree that the developers should know what they want to push the project and community however right before building the platform more thought needs to be put in the initiative. The modern internet has changed the market in a way that the marketeers don’t determine the outcome of the market anymore with monodirectional communication (which they apparently have not understood yet) but the modern shopper is smart and well informed and insists on dialogue. At the same time they want to the be entertained and have the opportunity to entertain themselves.
If you create a community for large sums of money have a great idea, plan and team to realise the project. Dare to be different but before finishing the project, open it up and get some external feedback. Social network users can’t stand being indirectly exploited but just ask them for help and make sure that they get something back besides some cyberpoints (not very creativ). It is all about the basic instinct of feeling important and give the users a chance to be popular and famous and they will help you significantly (not always of course but dare to try it ;).
To sum it up there is no real formula but think of users benefit and get feedback before you invest all your money in a branded community without asking the crowd whether they want it. The users are smarter than you think!