What is brand community identity?

In this era of material prosperity, the dazzling array of goods gives consumers too much choice. Too many choices means information overload, to the point that younger consumers no longer trust advertising and instead make consumption decisions based on their own interests, values ​​and attitudes.

As a result, brands began to interact with consumers more frequently and creatively with the goal of having equal dialogue with consumers. This is a kind of "horizontal interactive communication" that is different from the previous top-down communication method.

The biggest feature of horizontal interactive communication is "lowering one's posture". There are many down-to-earth cases such as Tencent's battle with Lao Gan Ma, Lao Xiang Ji, and Cadillac's flash advertising; there are also various attitudinal marketing and emotional marketing that cater to consumers' interests in terms of emotions, values, and attitudes.

These marketing methods all have a common purpose - to play and chat with consumers.

Who is the most successful in this regard?

Everyone’s first impression may be Bilibili. As a video community favored by young people, Bilibili’s development is booming, and its stock price has tripled in less than three years since its listing. However, the negative cases that occurred some time ago seem to tell us that even brands loved by users are still vulnerable in the face of crises.

Is this really the case?

Although this article is not mainly about Bilibili, after reading it you should know: why crisis and negativity will become the new normal for all brands in the future; why the worse Bilibili falls, the stronger it will become, but other brands may not be so lucky.

1. Brand control is gradually fading in social media communities

Last year, Hua Shan, the founder of H&H, mentioned a new term at the brand upgrade press conference of Xinchao Media: brand traffic sovereignty.

He gave a very interesting example at that time:

The cost of purchasing traffic is becoming increasingly expensive, leaving many street shops with no more advertising budget. They have no choice but to move their street shops into office buildings and save on rent to purchase traffic. But street shops have their own traffic, and moving into an office building is equivalent to locking yourself up in the traffic prison of traffic providers. Waiting for traffic merchants to deliver prison food every day means losing traffic sovereignty.

The loss of traffic sovereignty reflects the trend that companies are losing control of their brands, but brands are not only facing the "power vacuum" caused by external competition, but also the lack of voice at the consumer level. Everyone should be familiar with the specific reasons: no one reads the PR articles written by brands, the conversion rates of published ads are getting worse and worse, and the communication barriers between brands and consumers are getting bigger and bigger.

The frequent occurrence of "cross-border marketing" cases in the past two years has actually hinted at risks. It reminds us that companies can no longer rely on the attractiveness of the brand itself to gain consumer attention, participation and interaction. As a result, many brands have begun to actively participate in young people’s “dialogues” about brands, making marketing strategies and advertising persuasion more “down-to-earth” and “younger”.

This is what I said at the beginning, communicating with consumers through “horizontal interactive communication”.

This is easy to understand. Along with the iteration of consumers, there must be a change in the way of communication. However, if a brand compromises and caters to young people blindly, it will cause the brand to lose its own style. Most of the earthy marketing cases are not suitable. The brand gains popularity but loses "face".

More importantly, when a brand’s reputation, appeal, and attraction all need to rely on a certain external group for support, the danger of the corporate brand “losing control” is more urgent, especially when the consumer group it faces is young people whose interests and cognition are not yet fixed.

2. It is difficult for young people to identify with a brand for a long time

The popularity of Heytea has not allowed consumers to establish long-term and stable loyalty to it. Consumers who drink Heytea also drink "Yidiandian" and are the users who queue up to check in at Chayan Yuese. For young people, they are hardly the “core fans” of any brand. So, where is the problem?

In the 1980s, David Aaker proposed the concept of "brand value" and also introduced a number of brand building methods and concepts. The four stages of brand building are widely recognized in the industry, namely: brand awareness - brand recognition - brand association - brand loyalty.

It is not difficult to make a brand well-known and recognized. The advertisement "Hengyuanxiang, sheep, sheep, sheep" became famous overnight after being published in authoritative media. The advertisement also quickly formed a cognitive association between wool and products.

Hengyuanxiang brainwashing advertisement: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av70216586/

The problem arose in the final stage of brand loyalty building. Hengyuanxiang failed to transform consumers' brand awareness into identification, resulting in insufficient stamina and it was quickly abandoned by younger consumers.

Of course, contemporary brands understand "trends" better than Hengyuanxiang. They have long begun to tie their brands to the lifestyles and emotions of young people, trying to awaken their identification by causing resonance. It’s just that young people are the best consumers but not the best brand audience.

In the past two years, brands that focused on women's power and took advantage of gender conflicts have achieved good results. Now, with the collapse of Mimi Meng's feminism, gender has also become a sensitive topic. In lifestyle marketing, the petty-bourgeois tone commonly used in Alipay advertisements also backfired in Huabei advertisements. Consumers have realized the scam of these exquisitely packaged "consumerism" advertisements.

This generation of young people is growing up, their values ​​are changing, and the brands they originally supported are also being abandoned. Consumers’ identification with a brand does not mean they will identify with it for a long time. This is human nature and an inevitable result of consumer growth. It’s just that young people grow faster.

Therefore, we need a new indicator - brand community recognition.

3. What is brand community identity?

Readers who have read our previous article should remember that Muniz & O'Guinn (2001) proposed the concept of brand community, which means that there is a community-like relationship interaction between brands and consumers, and between consumers.

There are also two types of mutual recognition relationships in this community: one is the recognition between consumers and brands, and the other is the mutual recognition between consumers.

Simply put, when consumers see an advertisement and recognize the relationship between the brand and themselves, they will form brand identification. When a consumer mentions this brand to another consumer, he or she will develop a sense of group belonging based on the brand, which is brand community identity.

Brand identification is the basis for consumers to generate purchasing behavior, and brand community identification is an important factor in maintaining consumers' long-term brand loyalty and sense of participation. Currently, many spontaneously organized communities, such as car clubs and fan support groups, have a high degree of brand community identification.

The activity level of these communities is usually very high, because consumers' identification with a brand does not lead to interaction between the brand and consumers. What really determines the sense of participation and interaction is the mutual identification of consumers in the community.

Therefore, although Xiaomi sells digital products, at the beginning of its development it still chose to create its own online community, allowing its fans to communicate freely in the community and form a good community identity. This kind of identification forms the cohesion of the entire brand. Even if one consumer "turns against" the brand, others who enter the brand community will also be infected.

At the same time, Xiaomi phones can continuously collect feedback from consumers in the community and grow together with them, thus maximizing the avoidance of "communication misalignment" that causes the brand to lose control.

4. Summary and Thoughts

Returning to the topic of Bilibili’s public relations crisis, the “gender topic” is extremely sensitive this year and any brand may step on the landmine, and Bilibili’s own soft pornography problem is also very prominent. Therefore, practitioners in the brand marketing industry should not be too surprised by the negative news.

However, if we only complain about Bilibili’s PR operations, we will still ignore many key factors.

For example, the essence of this incident is not the conflict between Bilibili and the UP master, but the conflict of "fans' opinions", behind which is the conflict of values ​​caused by the rise of individual consciousness. In a platform where interest is king, every consumer is inevitably trapped in an information cocoon, and irreconcilable two levels of views will form among fan groups. If a brand rashly takes sides, it will not please either side.

Therefore, although B Station’s public relations measures seem to have failed, in fact, “giving each party 30 slaps” can minimize losses to the greatest extent, while releasing conflicts and avoiding the accumulation of larger problems. In this era, if a brand does something wrong, there is almost no room for redemption except to admit its mistake frankly.

More conflicts of values ​​will erupt in the future market, and crises and negativity will be the norm for all brands. Brands that value community brand identity will emerge stronger, but others may not be so lucky.

Author: Community Marketing Research Institute

Source: Community Marketing Research Institute