Community Strategy for Growth
As word of mouth and loyalty becomes harder and harder to earn for brands; community strategy needs to be part of your business strategy and not just your marketing strategy.
Status of community strategy in India:
Most businesses are using the buzzword community when only thinking about their social media. But that’s not enough. Community strategy should be at the heart of product, marketing and even org development strategy.
What’s Community Strategy?
It’s declaring your commitment towards solving challenges for a community/tribe.
The community could be bound by the same beliefs, values, passions, purpose, and unmet needs that your brand solves for. When you build for the community, every member of the community can act as an influencer for your brand and also the consumer. Instead of trying to target a single consumer, now your businesses need to think about targeting community.
But it’s gutsy, bold and mostly scary!
Because it is about addressing the needs of a niche market and because it’s niche it’s quite counter intuitive to the TAM, SAM or SOM philosophy which drive most investors.
BUT, as new data privacy concerns and rules get stricter across the globe for both Meta and Google ads it makes more sense to work backwards and plan to target communities instead of individuals.
It’s about answering whether you are solving for the depth or the breadth
What does it mean in business terms?
In product language:
Are you a tshirt brand which will tap into a market’s every tshirt need?
Or are you a tshirt brand that’s going to solve for a gym goer’s need to kit up right to do his routine.
In marketing language:
Are you going to talk about why this tshirt is better than the others in market?
Or are you going to talk about how this tshirt gives you more flexibility to work out in your gym vs ordinary tshirts.
In organisation development language:
Are we going to hire someone who has experience and passion for building a lifetstyle brand?
Or are we going to hire someone who has worked in the gym and active wear segment?
Because that’s what Gym Shark does. The name was not enough they have now launched a platform called - “We do Gym”.
WE’RE GYMSHARK
We make gym stuff. The best gym stuff.
Built from the squat rack, not the running track.
We’re not good at everything, we’re great at one thing.
’Cause we were born in the gym, and stayed in the gym.
Consumers have so many options that if you are not solving for their specific challenge they have no need to feel loyal towards your brand.
That’s why community based brand building even though a buzzword makes sense.
And why should we believe GymShark is on the right path?
McKinsey has done research on this strategy of community flywheel. Businesses operating in this model has higher EBIDTA.
Learning from the Nike saga
Because we all heard of the Nike saga from insiders and the stock markets. The brand that was created for athletes and runners, that invented celebrity brand marketing with Jordans is now unable to attract the rising stars to associate with it. Their product innovation seems to be suffering. And many have declared it’s because Nike is trying to do everything for everyone. Calling every body an athlete is saying whether you have an aspiration to lead an athlete’s life, you can wear a Nike, like a lifestyle brand.
And what’s wrong with that?
When Nike starts looking like a lifestyle brand suddenly its competition landscape changes. Earlier Adidas, Reebok were challenging their market share. Now, apart from the new-age brands like Gymshark, Under armour even the lifestyle brands like a Zara and H&M become their competition.
Hence the product language and marketing language are different for each of the cases as I showed above.
What really happened at Nike?
After reading couple of essays and hearing conversations in international marketing groups, there seems to be multiple wrong decisions that has said to loss in market share.
Betting on DTC and ditching their channel partners
No clear hero-products apart from Jordan series
Top management issues.
Nike will most likely bounce-back, but small business and fledgling brands can’t afford such blunders.
I am deep-diving into community strategy for brand building. In India, Royal Enfield thrived on community strategy. Some young challenger brands are doing community strategy well.
Do you see any Indian brands using community strategy at the core? Which one would you like me to deep dive into?
https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2024/07/interview-gymsharks-stratford/#:~:text=Since its inception%2C Gymshark has,our brand and our products”.
We do gym from gymshark is about focusing on being the gym brand
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