Communities Dominate Brands

First Endorsements ! Red Bull, TV2 Norway like the book

We have first endorsements for Communities Dominate Brands. Red Bull's UK Managing Director, Harry Drnec and Norwegian TV2's VP - who is a former commissioner of the ITC endorse the book. Here is what they said:

The authors vividly illustrate the rapidly growing power of digital communities with examples of real cases where companies have achieved considerable business success by being creative and engaging customers. Harry Drnec, Managing Director Red Bull UK

This book clearly identifies the significant issues facing the audio-visual industry and the impact these have on commercial broadcasting. John Ranelagh - Vice President TV2 Norway, former Commissioner of the ITC

Thank you Harry and John !  We will reproduce here more endorsements as we receive them.

Innovation through the community

My co-author and friend Tomi Ahonen gave me an article from the economist yesterday called

The future of innovation. The rise of the creative consumer

I read it and then to Tomi's astonishment did some energetic breakdance moves whilst saying "YEAH BABY, YEAH." Now why did I do that?

Because the article discusses how online communites are engaging with a whole raft of businesses to develop either physical of virtual products. And is of course another verification of the thesis contained within our book Communities Dominate Brands

Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers and it putting several of them into production. Electronic Arts, a maker of of computer games, ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications online and works their creations into new games. And so on. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product development manager, too.

It is common sense in many ways. As we believe at SMLXL that nobody is as clever as everybody. The article mentions a new book, "Democratising Innovation" in which the author Eric von Hippel argues that the rise of online communities, combined with the creation and wide access to powerful and easy- to-use design tools has powered this phenomenon into the maiinstream as never before.

Right back in history circa 1996 a game developer in LA first noticed how gamers were working on improving the game "Red Alert" themselves and then posting these on fan websites. The Economist reports that Westwood the game company decided to embrace this rather than try to ringfence it and shut it down. The result a very powerful ongoing R&D relationship between gamers and the company.

Today we are in a world where customers are demanding more and more and always different manifestations of value+

By engaging a community of passionate and loyal fans within an innovation process is essentially a win-win, and there is evidence that community led innovations have a far greater chance of success than the traditional process, which focus groups itself into mediocrity.

We have seen on a global scale how understanding a community and engaging that community is far more sensible and dare I say profitable than ignoring it.

Building brands through a community

My good friend Adriana at the Big Blog Company flipped a link over to me today aboout building a brand via a blog and a community, which I wished we could have shoehorned into our book Communities Dominate Brands .

From the loiclemeur blog which I think worth quoting heavily from

The French entrepreneur Patrice Cassard redefines ecommerce by entirely basing its sales on the word of mouth his products and blog create. To my knowledge, he does not buy any advertising and sales are soaring.

You only have to read his Movable Type blog and how many comments he has to understand the community of t-shirt fans he has created. Patrice's readers participate in everything, they give their advise and suggestions, they create trust around an unknown brand for new site visitors by the quality of the comments.

There is more. Patrice has just relaunched his ecommerce shop to integrate his customers in the t-shirt creation process. Anybody can propose a new t-shirt visual, which is then submitted to vote. The best logos are produced on t-shirts and the authors get 300 euros for each of them.

La Fraise customers are in the center of the company and define the new products. Amazing experience that shows us the path to new e-commerce around blogs and conversations, with trust and customer feedback as the two key drivers of business. The word of mouth does the rest.

So go and check out La Fraise

If anyone out there believes that today we can ignore communities, or that we cannot create them I suggest they pause for thought. Because this is happening at so many levels that it demonstrates that our insights at SMLXL are correct. Markets are conversations and the role of what we describe as GenC or the community generation is a theory based today on reality.

This turns conventional branding and marketing on its head. How many times have I said that - I feel like a broken wheel. But if the Vice Chairman at General motors blogs because he knows he has a wider community he has to engage with, as well as the COO of Sun Microsysytems Jonathan Schwartz or Robert Scoble of Microsoft. If the Boeing World design team numbering 150,000 people contributing as a community into a commercial project. These are indications that we are witnessing a paradigm shift at many levels.

What is branding? What is media and who controls it? How do you go to market? How do you build your business model? Who are your stakeholders/community? There many more.

One has to understand that today 'the community' has the potential and capability to be a potent force that changes how we interact with eachother.
And how we do business. And this has as much to do with traditional bricks and mortar businesses with industrial age business models, as it has with any body else.

If I were a brand I would be sitting and thinking who is my community and how can I engage with them before someone else does?