What are brand communities, and how important are they for businesses?
If this sounds like you, you are in the right place.
This article will tell you what a branded community is and give you some of the best brand communities present today.
Want to find out?
Read through for this and much more.
What is a Branded Community?
A brand community is a collection of customers invested in a brand beyond what is sold. This group of individuals showcases their loyalty to a brand by being emotionally invested in it. Besides frequently buying from the brand, they act as the brand’s advocates who tell their families, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances about the brand.
The following are some of the best brand communities and what makes them successful.
GymShark
This fitness apparel brand has experienced tremendous growth over the years due to the powerful community it has built around itself. Through its Gymshark Central blog, the brand shares incredible and comprehensive healthcare and fitness tips through video tutorials and engaging blog posts.
Additionally, the brand employs rigorous social media marketing strategies, selecting some of the most renowned athletes to market its products and information. This allows customers to invest in the brands based on the athlete’s advice and incredible blog content.
Why it’s successful
By offering immersive and comprehensive fitness advice through video tutorials and engaging blog posts, GymShark has been able to build a successful community. This has made it a go-to place for any health and fitness-related issues.
Charlie Hustle
This sports t-shirt brand takes advantage of people’s love for sports to build a strong brand community. The company allows users to put on its signature t-shirts and show their support for the teams competing across the country.
The brand keeps it local by providing Kansas City-dedicated sports clothing allowing its customers to express their hometown pride. Charlie Hustle focuses on fostering a tight-knit community that’s brought together to establish relationships and friendships. The company has distinctive branding on each piece of sports apparel to promote its products locally.
Why it’s successful
Charlie Hustle engages in several content humanitarian initiatives to raise money to support local organizations, which has helped the company build a successful brand community. It also maintains frequent engagements with its clients to help it build healthy relationships and earn recognition as a successful local brand.
Starbucks
This is a Seattle-based coffeehouse chain globally known for producing outstanding coffee drinks. By referring to their employees as Starbucks partners, this company has hugely impacted how clients and customers view the brand. To help build a successful community, the company constantly engages with its customers and keeps them updated on any innovations and change initiatives.
The company also commits to keeping its customers engaged via its built-in customer reward programs, stars, extra points, and incentives. This leaves the customers feeling incredibly valued and cherished, encouraging them to make more purchases and become devoted brand community customers.
Why it’s successful
Starbucks’s commitment to prioritizing its customers by keeping them engaged with incredible built-in customer rewards has enabled the company to build a successful brand community.
Glow Recipe
The beauty industry is among the most thriving industries thanks to the many beauty influencers who have become more aware of the importance of taking care of their skin. Glow Recipe is a beauty products brand offering all-natural, fruit-based skin care products that are completely devoid of parabens and other toxic irritants.
The company, via its website, provides valuable information on everything that customers may want to know about its products. It includes video tutorials, customer reviews, and product recommendation quizzes.
Why it’s successful
Glow Recipe has built a strong community brand by providing value-added content via social media that keeps its customers updated and invested with new beauty content.
The Walt Disney Company
Think of entertainment; the first thing that comes to mind is a Disney movie. Founded over 100 years ago, Walt Disney is an entertainment and media company that creates and directs fascinating movies and narratives that keep customers entertained and engaged.
The company has carved a niche for itself in the entertainment field by coming up with movies that are contemporary, motivating, and packed with moral values.
Why it’s successful
Besides providing captivating and fascinating movies, Walt Disney has several signature parks and fan clubs that help to keep its followers and fans grouped and engaged. All this, plus the iconic characters that users can connect with, has enabled this company to build a strong brand community.
Inkbox
If tattoos are your thing, then inkbox is where you should be. Inkbox is among the top renowned temporary tattoo makers whose products are inspired by the local tribes of Panama who have been tattooing for many years as a family and community function.
Inkbox imitates the value of inclusivity and togetherness via Inkbox’s inkfam to ensure community members know how much they are valued. Using the hashtag #tattoosfornow, the brand allows its global social media fraternity to tag their photos for an opportunity to get featured on its website.
Why it’s successful
The ability of Inkbox to harness the power of social media as a tool to build an engaged and devoted brand community is what makes it successful.
Lululemon Athletica
As one of the top athleisure brands, Lululemon Athletica emphasizes the value of living a fitness-driven lifestyle and shows its clients how to achieve this in their daily lives. Through active social media marketing and free yoga lessons to help beginners familiarize themselves with the many facets of a healthy lifestyle, this company has built a devoted brand community.
The brand also has a store that provides quality athleisure clothes to community members to equip and encourage them to take charge of living fit and healthy lifestyles.
Why it’s successful
Lululemon Athletica has built a strong brand community by providing members with freely accessible and energetic experiences, including free yoga classes for first-timers or invitations to its organized festivals and events.
Itzy Ritzy
Itzy Ritzy has carved its position in the parenting niche by providing value-adding content and facilitating the sale of a wide range of parenting products and goods. By posting heartfelt and touching parenting stories which empathize with the emotions of being a parent, this brand has pulled a huge following of customers who have become the brand’s ambassadors and continue purchasing from the company.
To keep loyal customers who have stuck with the company for a long period happy and satisfied, the brand also offers a referral and award program that gives them discounts and referral bonuses.
Why it’s successful
Itzy Ritzy has successfully built a strong brand community by featuring authentic user-generated content based on real parenting stories and experiences of some of their customers. This encourages new customers to join the community.
Why Brand Communities Thrives
There are various reasons why brand communities thrive. These include;
- If a brand can keep its customers engaged by providing valuable content and sharing customer experiences.
- The ability to bring groups of people within the community who share ideas and interests helps promote the bond and strengthen the community.
- A strong brand community improves the public and private perception of the individual community members.
- A great brand community brings together the many facets of a brand’s interests in one location.
- The capacity to produce and distribute user-generated content is a powerful draw for the brand communities to thrive.
Why Brands Need a Strong Community
Brand communities are essential for the success and growth of any business. A brand that can resonate well with its customers can create a loyal community base that trusts and supports the company.
A strong brand community also serves as the company’s free advocates. Among other things, a strong community can help a business:
- Increase brand awareness: A strong community acts as a brand’s ambassador by referring the brand to others. People become vocal about brands they love and don’t shy from giving recommendations and testimonials about the brand’s products.
- Build consumer loyalty: When customers identify with a brand and become part of its community, they develop a sense of trust, loyalty, and commitment to the brand.
- Better customer connection: By building a strong community, a company can engage with its customers more, thus gaining a deeper understanding of their needs.
- Marketing ideas and research: A brand community can be a good source of new ideas and research for a business as members share stories, exchange ideas, and recommend product changes.
How to Build a Successful Brand Community
These are the steps you should follow if you want to build a successful brand community:
- Define your brand: Before building a community, you’ll need to find out what your brand. You’ll need to establish your company’s mission, vision, personality, voice, purpose, and values.
- Define your brand’s goals and metrics: Knowing what you want your business to achieve will give it directly to which customers can relate.
- Choose the platform to use: Identify the best channels that will be effective in helping you keep your customers engaged. This may include forums, social media, and rewards or loyalty programs.
- Regularly engage with your community: You’ll need to constantly communicate with your community via informative blogs, responding to queries, directly messaging your customers, and creating discussion points to strengthen your relationship with the customers.
Are You Ready to Build Your Online Brand Community
As mentioned earlier, brand communities are critical for the growth and success of any online business. Creating a community will help you communicate and build up authentic interactions with your loyal customers. A strong brand community can help promote your brand’s awareness, build customer loyalty, better understand your customers, and gain important ideas.
However, building an effective online brand requires effort. You will need to define your brand from the onset. You’ll also need to find ways to keep your community engaged by providing value-adding content.
Ready to build your brand community?
You can utilize ParcelPanel to help you build an effective community. This tracking tool allows you to create your own branded tracking page that you can share with your customers. With this feature, customers are able to track their orders right from your page without the need to use third party websites. Simply put, ParcelPanel will drive traffic to your page and help you enhance your brand by sending customers back to your branded tracking page.
Well, there’s all you need to know.
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