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Hello! Thank you for reading! This time I'll be writing about "community marketing." Until now the terms were ones I sort of knew already, but this is my first challenge with a term whose meaning I don't know… I'll write it so it's easy to follow! There weren't many reference materials this time, so I'll be writing based on information I looked up online!
1. What Is "Community Marketing"?
Community marketing, just as the words suggest, is a marketing method that leverages user communities. When you hear "community," what do you picture? I picture the countryside. Rural areas form their own communities, don't they? I wasn't born in the countryside and my grandparents are in a relatively urban area, so this is just my imagination… According to Digital Daijisen (Shogakukan), it's described as "a communal society sharing the same residential area and common interests. A community bound together — village, town, city, region — through production, self-governance, customs, habits, and so on. A local society." Of course, that's different from the community in community marketing. Thinking from the perspective of the company that carries out community marketing, marketing must have the benefit of revenue. The consumer is the presence that brings that revenue. A community of these consumers is the community that community marketing should focus on. More specifically, even among consumers, it mainly targets "existing customers." It's a method based on the idea of "raising sales by being recognized by many people through the community." In other words, in community marketing, consumers, while consuming the product or service, are also billboards that advertise the value of that product or service to their own community.
The important thing in community marketing is that the community is merely one method of marketing. If building a community becomes the goal in itself, then by definition it no longer qualifies as community marketing. Building it is not the goal, in other words.
2. What You Can Do with Community Marketing
■ Consumer voices Community marketing is a method that mainly targets especially active, enthusiastic fans among a company's fanbase — those who "want to keep spreading the word" and "want to let the people around them know this product (service) exists." As such, there are also many cases where they hold dissatisfactions like "I wish this part were a bit better" or "I wish something like this existed." Being able to obtain such real voices is one benefit. You can gather users' voices through street surveys or point-reward questionnaires too, but the awareness of those involved is different. The opinions of consumers a company has selected let you gather opinions from highly motivated consumers who feel "my opinion might make this product (service) even more to my liking."
■ Communication with users When a community isn't formed, the company has had to respond to consumers' opinions, questions, and doubts about a product. But with community marketing, consumers can respond to and resolve things among themselves. In other words, you can reduce costs.
3. Community Marketing Examples
■ Amazon Amazon has "JAWS-UG," a community among the users of its services. Any user can freely join, and within it they freely build communities matched to their interests while actively sharing and exchanging opinions.
■ COHINA A fashion brand launched in 2008 that provides clothes petite women can use in daily life. COHINA does live streaming every month using Instagram, and by hearing customers' real voices at high frequency, it grew into a fashion brand that reliably meets customer demand.
■ Nulab Inc. One of the services Nulab provides is the task-management tool "Backlog." We're indebted to it in our daily work too! Nulab holds an event called "Backlog World" once a year (held online in 2020). There, they have users communicate with one another, and also have users present sessions on cases where they actually used Backlog!
https://jbug.info/backlogworld2020/
4. Finally
This time I wrote about community marketing. With the growth of social media and the open chat that LINE offers, communication among users is increasing too. I feel community marketing holds great potential going forward! If reading this has made you want to know more about community marketing, please read "Community Marketing to Grow Both Your Business and Your Life," by Hideki Kojima, with whom we're on friendly terms day to day! Thank you for reading this time as well!