The Growing Role of User Communities in Building Brands
I was just watching the recent TED Talk by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. In the video he talks about how the explosive growth of Twitter has mainly come from unexpected uses by the Twitter community.
This reminds me of the Pabst Blue Ribbon story. PBR has always been a low-key, blue-collar brand. Back in the 1970′s, it was really popular, but with the explosive growth of huge brands like Budweiser and the birth of the microbrew industry, it lost a lot of its appeal.
As Douglas Atkin pointed out in “The Culting of Brands,” by the middle of 2002 the company was experiencing a completely unplanned turnaround:
“Pabst Blue Ribbon had miraculously become the fastest growing brand of all domestic beers, achieving double digit growth within a declining industry.
What happened to spark such a turnaround? A thriving community had adopted PBR as a brand that espoused their ideals. They liked how they had never seen advertisements for it, and that it was a throwback to America’s heartland and blue-collar ideals. It was a beer that wasn’t about image.
Ironically, this embrace quickly gave PBR an image. Impressively, PBR’s marketing team has resisted the temptation to jump on the hipster bandwagon and try to market to this cynical demographic. They realize that they are popular because they haven’t been trying to woo anyone. PBR wisely realizes that it needs to completely let go if they want to continue to enjoy their resurrection within the hispter community.”
Brands exist for the benefit of people. There’s really no other way to look at it. I think that today brands need to be malleable – people need to have the ability to mold them as they see fit. By doing so, people feel a sense of ownership for a brand, and therefore become more loyal.
Just look at Wikipedia. Most people didn’t think it would work, and what most of us underestimated is that users would be so committed to building the brand. All Wikipedia had to do was provide the skeleton – its users would do the job of fleshing it out.
Anyway, here’s Evan Williams at TED. It’s a short video – only about 8 minutes.
