Community Marketing
If you are trying to leverage communities as part of your marketing, there are a few things you need to approach differently.
1. Think consumer tribes – not market segments
The most important thing to know about your potential community members is how they behave with one another. That is much more important than to understand the market segment to which they belong based on market characteristics. That does not mean that traditional market segmentation will not allow you to discover tribes in some cases. As someone pointed out last week when we presented this concept at the BRITE conference, traditional market segmentation might have uncovered the stay-at-home moms as a segment in the health market. While true, traditional market segmentation would have described them by age bracket, income level and other such characteristics – and not by the behavioral characteristics that are so critical to understand how to structure the initial community.