In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki probably thought he was a heretic when he came out and said that crowds are inherently more logical than single individuals and are likely to arrive at better decisions. To some extent he’s right and to some extent he’s wrong.
Allow me to explain.
We can all agree that successful brands need to find new ways of creating enduring and mutually rewarding relationships with customers, clients, prospects and supporters. Marketers need to be and must be actively engaged. And for brands intent on building strong relationships with such consumers, this level of engagement isn’t always easy to achieve.
Yet in my experience, most marketers haven’t a clue as to what strategy to adopt to achieve a level of customer engagement that will help drive incremental sales.
Whilst some marketers are left scratching their heads, other marketers are leap-frogging them and connecting with online ‘tribes’ of consumers in fast moving and highly competitive market segments.
For example, let’s take the UK’s profitable ‘Yummy Mummy’ tribe. According to Netmums, the UK’s biggest parenting website, 72% of mums now check website reviews before buying an item for their kids, either in-store or online.
“In everyday life, people are sharing discounts, deals, and endorsements, so it’s given us a huge amount of power as consumers and the successful brands are the ones that realise that,” observes Siobhan Freegard, the founder of Netmums.
The web has clearly regenerated the ‘crowd power’ envisaged by James Surowiecki. Consumers have embraced the value of listening to their peers – something I discussed in a previous Vocus blog post.
In turn, this has directly led to a shift in how marketers should view segmentation models, something I discuss at length in my new book High Impact Marketing That Gets Results.
Online tribes, rather than conventional demographic models, now form the route to audience insight for marketers at the top of their game.
Consumers now have access to more information and they’re able to get together with more like-minded people. In many respects this is exactly how a tribe works – it’s made up of people with similar attitudes, values, beliefs, perceptions and behaviours so they might not necessarily be from the same age or socio-economic background but are bound together through much deeper ties.
As a result, the ‘Yummy Mummy’ tribe is a highly profitable segment for Netmums. The company is, for example, able to target expectant mums who are in different trimesters, as a result of the profile they share on the site.
From the perspective of the ‘Yummy Mummy’ tribe, it’s now very difficult if almost impossible for brand owners to pursue different pricing strategies in multiple channels – as members are notorious for hunting down bargains and promotions and sharing them.
Where I slightly depart from the view of James Surowiecki is that as a result of an abundance of data available to marketers, there are now even better opportunities available for marketers to reach individual members of a tribe across multiple dimensions, rather than seeing them as some amorphous group of collective wisdom.
By taking such an approach, marketers can combine these individual insights to help build a more granular picture of the tribe, as well as achieve a higher level of understanding of each individual member.
Online tribes are the in-crowd that marketers need to connect with. No question. But marketers need to do this by understanding customers as individuals first and foremost across a diverse range of daily interactions.
The marketers who fully grasp this opportunity – and who embrace data to understand the dynamics of virtual communities – are the ones who will be accepted by the in-crowd.
Ardi Kolah is author of High Impact Marketing That Gets Results, published by Kogan Page. Order your copy today and get a 30% discount by adding the code VOCUS30 on check-out. For more from Ardi on the Vocus Blog, click here.
Image: James Cridland (Creative Commons)
