Community is how we reach the missing middle
Strategy Leaders
UM’s chief strategy officer for EMEA offers advice for winning the battle for hearts and minds in the middle of the marketing funnel.
When it comes to our old friend the marketing funnel, there’s a growing divide.
Marketers are good at the top of funnel broadcasting to drive brand awareness – harnessing ‘mental availability’ and reaching minds. They’re also increasingly focused on the rational end focus of performance marketing, targeting ‘physical and digital availability’ to unlock our wallets.
This stretch has thinned out the funnel and highlighted that there’s a missing middle. This is the true battleground for brand relevance and consideration. The fight for customers’ hearts.
It’s often misunderstood and overlooked. Brands can do ‘have you heard of me?’ at the top and ‘where can you buy me?’ at the bottom, but they can struggle with the ‘why should I give a s**t?’ that sits between them.
That heartland lies in ‘communities’.
Reaching, building and understanding the communities of like-minded individuals who share common passions, interests, and experiences. This middle ‘C’ which connects and even accelerates culture and commerce (see more of that here).
People join communities to share the things they love. Being part of that can help brands create their own emotional connections and create value that stretches the company into new places – the way Nike and Adidas have moved in athlete-adjacent spaces such as fashion and music. But in such a charged space, they can also easily can get it wrong.
The good news, as Einstein put it, is that ‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity’.
To unlock those opportunities, there are a few simple principles that can help marketers create a suitable playbook:
Be an authentic part of the community you seek
Once you’ve identified the community that best fits your brand, you’ll have to get to know the leaders, topics of tension, moments, and madness within it. This is the key to finding a role for your brand in the community, not the other way around.
That could mean creating shared business results so that as the community invests into the brand, the brand can invest back into the community.
Mastercard, for example, authentically supported the LGBTQ+ community with the True Name campaign by tackling a real tension: that many people feel humiliated when having to show their birth name (and not their chosen name) on bank cards. The brand partnered with GLAAD to create a new credit card that allowed people to show their chosen name on their card.
Doritos, meanwhile, identified that snacking and gaming went together and built a major partnership with Twitch, whilst Unilever’s Open Innovation initiative invites the entrepreneur community to submit ideas that will potentially be bought, then created, as products for the community.
Add more than you take
It’s vital to create real utility for the community and leave it in a better place than when you entered. The value exchange has to be weighted on the side of the community for your campaign to be seen as more than just a stunt.
A brand might want to target a hyper-localised community in a particular area and create a campaign just for them, for example.
Dr Martens has always been a brand that has understood this value exchange well.
Its programme Dr Martens Presents (pictured above) supports up-and-coming artists through a number of initiatives, such as a new community music studio in Bristol, £60,000 grants for underrepresented voices and giving artists a platform through podcasts, gigs and events.
Red Bull has also consistently invested in communities better than most and understands that you have to offer them something real.
Its Music Academy was a mainstay for aspiring music-makers for 20 years, offering lectures and workshops as well as festivals and even a radio station.
Trust comes with consistent action over time, not a token effort.
Do it together
Ideally, brands can co-create and collaborate on the idea and content with the community they’re intending to reach.
H&M created the fashion brand Nyden by working directly with influencers, while Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ ads have seen consumers’ images turned into billboards. Its latest spot also features a musician creating a track from Apple sounds.
However, it’s also important to remember that a community with a diverse mix of perspectives demands similar diversity among the agencies and marketers trying to connect with them.
If the community isn’t reflected in the team, it’s already an uphill struggle. But if it is, that’s going to be your way in.
Tom diSapia is chief strategy officer EMEA at UM
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