Over the last few years, the concept of Owned Media for brands have extended beyond a simple product websites, blogs and email campaigns. By embracing social media, content marketing and influencer marketing, advertisers have created Branded Communities where in they can engage with consumers deeper than ever before. Whether this is Apple Support Community, LEGO Ideas or Sephora’s Beauty Insider, companies have been able to provide better product support and obtain greater customer insights while at the same time attain goodwill and increase brand favourability.

These brand-controlled and curated environments have allowed companies to leverage content from multiple sources rather than just traditional marketing and advertising messaging. Branded Communities are perfect sites for blogs with content specific to products values and unique selling points that are expressed in plain language and less formal tones. Images and videos from consumers’ Instagram or other social media posts can be re-purposed as needed, there by keeping the community content fresh without taxing marketing budgets.

By effectively integrating the branded communities with their influencer marketing campaign, the branded communities becomes an effective asset at converting new potential customers. Existing customers feel heard, and depending on who they are, can become Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) that provide unique insights to other users as well as the brand itself. Our partner, Passionation.co, has demonstrated this impact by driving a significant increase in coupon redemption rates for Subway in Malaysia through its Branded Community strategy. As a platform specializing in influencer-driven engagement, Passionation has successfully blended influencer marketing with community building for a diverse portfolio of brands, including Coca-Cola, Dyson, and Mamonde. As Branded Communities are fully opt-in and wholly owned by the brand, companies can further leverage the data collected to increase audiences, tailor marketing messages and even optimize their own marketing. This provides a brand safe environment for brand to connect to consumers and consumers to connect to each other. For Nestlé in Malaysia, our partner Innity—a regional digital media and ad tech company—has enhanced this experience by gamifying participation. Users earn points through activities such as receipt scans, in-store promotional activations, and ad interactions. Innity has also successfully built and managed Branded Communities for well-known brands like Sephora and BHPetrol, showcasing the platform's ability to deliver meaningful consumer engagement across a broad spectrum of advertisers.

‍

However the more popular or widely-used a product becomes, “fan communities” may begin to pop up. Fan Communities in places like Reddit, Discord or even Facebook are set up by people who are favourable to the brand and are enthusiastic about connecting to other consumers like them. The difference with Branded Communities, of course, is that brands do not and should not be in control of these pages as that would be deemed subversive and unauthentic. The “Fans” may be there to discuss product attributes, compare with other brands, or just to complain, and this content is publicly available and read by many people. The fact that the brands do not control these environments means that there may be content that are negative or contain comparisons with competitors. Brands, their ambassadors and influencers can and should engage with these communities. This should be done explicitly so that the community knows they are engaging with paid advocacy – the way hotels and restaurant owners engage with users of Trip Advisor.

So brands should treat these Fan Communities as an extension of their Branded Community strategy and possibly as a collaboration with community leaders. For example, Fan Community can be a great way to reward the right consumers with coupons, recruit KOCs, or offer trial samples – beyond normal advertising targeting and promotional campaigns. More often than not, these Fan Communities have larger audiences than Branded Communities and offer a way to recruit people into Branded Communities. A Fan Community may be specific to a product or service category rather a particular brand; they may even be topical such as Parenting, or Electric Vehicles. In this case, it is even more important to engage to these potential consumers who may be using competitors’ products. Use the Branded Community to keep the Fan Community ecosystem vibrant but independent.

For H+, we see these Fan Communities as gold mines for our clients. The insights we gather from these consumers will help inform our communications strategy as we develop and refine personas for specific products. As we train and tune the H+ Intelligence Platform to help each client understand people better, our sei-katu-sha insights gathered from both Branded Communities and Fan Communities will further refine our models foreach client. Ultimately, both communities together can unlock much deeper value and further increase a brand’s authenticity, reach, innovation, and emotional engagement.

‍