Social Commerce: Building a Brand Community
Business is relationship and connection
Johan de Lange, cofounder of Transsmart Holdings Limited, is a Moja advisor. Transsmart has built an innovative and versatile type of payments infrastructure. Nope, no new wallet, no new cards, nothing new to add to the many payment options out there. Rather a new way of looking at payments, possibly even trying to make them disappear, make them a non-event, make them so seamless they become unnoticeable. This post was originally published as an article on Johan’s LinkedIn page, and is republished here with permission.
When you walk by two restaurants, one busy, the other empty, which one do you choose to sit down at for a meal? The busy one, right? I mean the crowd can’t be wrong. For the restaurant trade, being busy has always been good, as it’s what draws more customers to you.
For all industries, thanks to the revolution caused by personal, connected devices, a change in their customer engagement strategy is urgently needed, or the crowd will never arrive or possibly worse, move on. For example, my observation of fintech specifically and (“insert industry name here”)-tech generally is that their success is largely due to their customer-centric approach — how they understand their customers better than the traditional players do in a specific field or industry. While very few of them are positioned to kill off these traditional players completely, as a result, they will take over key, usually profitable services within that space, leaving the traditional players very little opportunity for growth outside their core service. Telco has experienced this phenomenon and banking has seen major shifts recently that create future revenue risk for banks who choose to ignore these changes.
Successful brands in (“insert industry name here”)-tech build brand communities. This is a major key to sustained success, in my opinion. Apple has shown over the years that its community strength puts the brand head and shoulders above any other in tech today. It rides through tough times with relative ease, as the Apple community sticks together regardless of circumstance and is loyal to buy products that are sometimes quite basic compared to the competition. I mention tough times, because everyone wants to be your customer in “good times.” When your customers are treated well, they feel part of your brand community, they feel listened to, they feel appreciated, they feel valued, and they reward you with loyalty, but they can also act as your ambassadors, your agents, and even your sales team.
I’ve previously written about the value proposition of fintech, specifically how fintech gives customers better, more efficient, more informed access to their investment, cash, credit or insurance, who then, in return, fight for these brands, sell others on the brand’s service or product, and ultimately become protective of its growth and profitability. While a bank may be around for many more years to guard the cash vault, it is fintech that will be providing access to that cash at a nice premium unless retail banks change their strategy and really become customer-centric. Can banks emulate this success, even if they are slow to change? Yes, I believe they can, but they need to change how they view their customer base to achieve that. Banks must start engaging with customers as if they are family, the brand’s own community. My passion today becomes relevant to this discussion, a passion for finding ways to build a brand’s customer base into such a community, who like Apple’s fan base, will help guide, build, and protect that brand.
Some basics to building a brand community:
1. People need to feel welcome: Customers are never repeat customers unless they feel welcome. Gyms have this challenge, where the very customers who need to attend gym and get healthy most often feel intimidated and judged, never to return. The gym owners who understand this and change their treatment of such customers, are flourishing and growing as a result. With any brand this remains the most important part of customer engagement, making them feel appreciated, feel welcome. Customers need to know they are valuable to a business, that they are listened to, “taken into the fold” as it were, and that they are engaged with a genuine interest by the brand.
2. People need to feel they relate to something common or they will not feel part of the brand family. Allowing them to interact with other customers and brand envoys (customer engagement staff, for example) around common issues and challenges, is a great way to establish “common ground.” Even with a mix of positive and negative issues to deal with, customers will feel needed, feel like they can add value, feel a sense of accomplishment when they are part of a solution. Make room for customer engagements that allow people to find common ground in a positive uplifting environment.
3. A community of people is usually found where there is value offered. Value, not only financial, but related value to the type of services a customer will seek from a brand. For example, banks who have bothered to implement the simplest of financial guidance tools for customers to use online and/or on their mobile apps, have already seen customer appreciation in various ways, from higher usage of their electronic channel (i.e., lowering the cost to serve) to better budgeting behavior. Value is MORE than a “promise of value,” it needs to be real and immediate.
There is much more to add, but these three pointers are at least memorable, so I’ll leave a more extensive list to another discussion. Instead, let’s look at the value created by such a community for the brand:
1. Brand communities guide brands: There are many examples of willing and deep customer engagements that helped brands better their services, improve their products and enhance their offerings, so this is possibly the most obvious of the advantages in building a brand community. Many open source projects and community editions of software have shown just how effective brand communities can be to improve a product by direct and acknowledged involvement.
2. Brand communities engage on behalf of a brand: Where customers are part of your brand family, they become extensions of your customer engagement channels. They help fellow customers through issues and help resolve problems willingly and as volunteers.
3. Brand communities help grow revenue: Not only are customers who feel part of your brand family going to become repeat customers for you, they are also going to help you sell more of your product to other people. When you feel appreciated by a brand, you tend to speak out, make it known and guide others to the brand.
Examples of African brand community successes, in my opinion (trying to pick from more than just the financial services industry):
1. GTBank’s amazing “737” top-up service in Nigeria, hands down the simplest most convenient way to top up your airtime there, and if made available pan African, possibly the most convenient tool anywhere on the continent. It just works, built by a dynamic team of people within the bank under the leadership of Bolaji Lawal, as well as their partner, Clickatell Nigeria. This was a bank that listened to its customers, bypassed the traditional way “to do things as a bank” and managed to build the largest single channel for PINless airtime top-up in Nigeria, opening up many opportunities to reach non-GTBank customers and even unbanked phone users.
2. I have always maintained that mPOS is NOT about the device, it’s about the ecosystem. For me, the successful mPOS providers in the medium to long term will be those who help SMEs better understand, manage and build their businesses, the very basis of a brand community, not the ones who simply provide a device. So those who were smart enough to build “mini” or “mobile” store fronts, back end management tools and ecosystem integrations into their “mPOS” offering, are the ones that are still around and growing today. An interesting pivot for me here has been FDC’s acquisition of Clover with the ability to affect many of their 6m+ retailer community through mPOS technology, bringing alongside the device and immediate mobile app technology many additional services within their group to help grow and manage those retail businesses — again, the very basis for an excellent brand community.
3. Moven, Atom and the ever-surprising Santander are all great examples of companies that embraced their role in disrupting their industry with some vigor — and have created large follower communities as a result. The changes they have brought about are real and effective giving many customers richer services and real value as opposed to what they had received from the market incumbents for years. Some of their customers today are their loudest ambassadors, an immediate effect of brand communities.
4. In South Africa a retailer (PEPKOR) did the same, creating an amazing tool that built a brand community of now over 18m customers. The PEPtxt product launched in 2011, on USSD as a dynamic PEP branded chat tool that allows their customers to talk and engage with the brand, consume content and much more. Interesting side point and totally unrelated to the core of this post, PEPtxt uses *130*737# as their service code, another “737” success story. Not only is the retailer getting marketing value from this brand community with whom they can directly engage, but PEP Cell (their mobile phone division) can extract revenue from the database it creates.
I tweeted recently that one of the new year’s resolutions for banks must be to change their current customer (non) engagement strategy to a brand community strategy. It is the change every industry should consider, since personal, connected devices have changed everything, starting a snowball effect that will lead to social commerce models that will include only those companies who embraced the change and exclude those who ignored it. Don’t wait until that change has happened, because another brand will own your community by then.
One of the most interesting evolutions in mobile tech today is the ability now to reach anyone anywhere and to engage with them. The focus should be to successfully build a brand community and to change their customers into family.Once this is achieved, the value proposition is not just the immediate and very effective connection between brand and customer, but the extension of that relationship into true social commerce, where your customer becomes so much a part of your business flow that they enhance it for you, that they become not the end of your journey, but companions to it, both leading to a destination called success.