From Brand Communities to Community Brands

Frankfurt.
We start this second day of Prosumer Revisited with a keynote by Johann Füller (his co-author Eric von Hippel couldn't make it here, unfortunately). He asks whether consumers are able to create strong brands - and points to Wikipedia and Apache as successful examples. Such user-generated brands have as yet not been recognised in world indices of the strongest brands, though.

What's happening here is a move from company brands not simply to brand communities (communities based around existing brands, like Apple or Nike), but indeed the creation of community brands: brands which are created from scratch by interest communities. Such brands can become strong competition to conventional brands, not least because these interest communities also drive brand adoption. Apache, for example, has a 70% market share, and is able to be a leading brand in a market which also includes competitors such as Microsoft.

Some such brands are also strongly attractive to contributors because participation in their development has become prestigious for participants; and there's been the development of whole cottage industries about such user-created brands. In such cases, community brands have become strong alternatives to conventional brands and even to conventional brand communities.

One such community brand is the German Outdoorseiten.net, a user-created brand for outdoor enthusiasts, Casemodder.de for DIY computer system builders, or Skibuilders.com for ski enthusiasts. A brand, of course, is no more than a term, sign, symbol, or design which enables users to identify and recognise the provenance of a good or service - the brand indicates symbolic use and enables users to express their own identity; it is a status symbol, too. 4% of worldwide GDP, in fact, is generated by the sale of fake brand products. Brands have become an Ersatz religion for some users, Johann suggests.

How are brands created today? The creation and reception of brands is determined by various stakeholder groups, which define the meaning and symbols associated with a specific brand - both protagonists and antagonists are important (anti-Hummer communities and anti-Microsoft communities are also important in increasing brand identification in those people who are in turn opposed to such antagonism, for example). There are also symbolic freeriders - users who are not part of the target community, but nonetheless utilise the brand to express their own identity, possibly with negative repercussions for the mainstream brand community.

How can the value and strength of brands be measured, then? In the first place, consumer recognition and knowledge can be measured; also, it is possible to determine what price premium may be attached to a brand (how much more can be charged for a branded product as opposed to a comparable vanilla product), and how much a brand adds to the overall company value. There are a number of steps in brand building: deep and broad brand awareness, strong, favourable and unique brand associations, positive, accessible reactions, and intense, active loyalty from users.

Johann and Eric have examined all of this in the context of Outdoorseiten.net (ODS), which now has some 11,000 members. This community is involved in exchanging outdoor tips and experiences, but also in creating their own outdoor clothing and gear (jackets, backpacks, etc.), and one of the key motivations for such participation in the first place is in filling in the gaps left by mainstream outdoor gear producers; beyond this, the pride of such user-creators was then also expressed in their creation of own, personalised logos for the products they create, and led ultimately to the development of a general Outdoorseiten logo. But this, then, also led to the replacement of producer labels on store-bought gear with the ODS label - a re-branding of commercial gear with the ODS brand.

Another example is the community's collaborative creation of a new tent design; the community realised than commercial tent manufacturers were simply using OEM factories in China or elsewhere to produce their gear, and noted that it could do this itself. The whole process took a few years - from initial interest group activities in 2001 through the development of the first own prodicts in 2002 to individual label creation and the development of a real community brand in 2005.

And ODS is not alone in this - there are many more outdoor enthusiast communities with their own brands online now, for example. Many participants in such communities would favour the community's own brand over other, even well-regarded brands, if quality and price were comparable; some would even accept a somewhat higher price if it would enable them to go with the community brand. Johann suggests that ODS could gain a 34% market share if it began to offer its products for sale on a large scale.

The more people are attached to a commercial brand, the less they're prepared to switch to the community brand, of course; the more community attachment they have, on the other hand, the more their willingness to switch. Experience with using the community products outdoors, and trust in the production quality, also help them to switch. Perceptions of excitement, authenticity, and reliability have also been found to boost users' preference for the community brand. Broader perceptions of the community itself (as fun, exciting, likeminded, and sharing similar experiences, for example), are also extremely important - in open source, for example, community consensus has been found to be more important in determining development directions than mere code quality.

Community brands are also important as co-brands: as providing inputs into commercial product development. The ODS community, for example, worked with an established tent manufacturer in bringing its tent designs to market, and the new product was very successful on the market: community members themselves were vastly more likely to buy such co-developed, co-branded products than community or commercial products alone. There is an aspect of symbolic freeriding here as well - many of the eventual customers were not community members themselves. Much of the proceeds from such sales were used for public interest projects, by the way - for example for restoring hiking paths. ODS is non-profit, but not non-commercial, in other words.

So, community brands are initiated by community members, and members make their own meaning and design their own products, and then outsource production and sales themselves to commercial partners. The community is the brand, and all community activities are part of the brand story. This also generates strong emotional attachment to brands, not least also because the community continues to control the brand and brand communication, and because the aim of the brand is in the first place to satisfy the community's own needs.

Such community brands have the potential to drastically transform the market, at virtually no cost; they create new business oppportunities for design support, production, and logistics. They can become serious competitors, but also important partners for conventional commercial operators.

Technorati : Outdoorseiten, Prosumer Revisited, brands, community brand, design, marketing, produsage, prosumer, user-led
Del.icio.us : Outdoorseiten, Prosumer Revisited, brands, community brand, design, marketing, produsage, prosumer, user-led