Proving a Community ROI: By Shutting It Down The inimitable and omniscient Richard Millington from Feverbee shares how he created the ultimate experiment to prove a brand community’s ROI. He shut it down. Read on to find out what happened next
The Ultimate Test of a Brand Community For the past decade, my community consultancy, FeverBee, has wanted to measure the value of the community by undertaking the ultimate test; closing the community down. The problem here is a brand community is a lot like a party, you can’t cut the power for a while and expect things to immediately start back up a month later. People will have moved on. You might prove the community’s value, but it will be a bittersweet moment. Last year we persuaded a client to do the next best thing; we hid the community for four months and waited
to see what would happen. During that time we saw support staff become overwhelmed with customer queries that would otherwise have been handled in the community. We discovered it was 72% cheaper to answer a question via the community than support. And we found the satisfaction scores of customers plummeted to one of the lowest levels on record.
“It’s 72% cheaper to answer a question in a brand community”
What Is a Brand Community Today? Before we dive deeper into the research, we need to update our image of brand communities. The image most people have of brand communities is woefully out of date. If you imagine a brand community, you might imagine Harley Davidson riders going on long adventures together or Apple fans queuing around the block to buy the new iPhone. But these are cult brands, not brand communities. They’re fun to talk about, but impossible to replicate. The number of cult brands is very few (there are more articles about cult brands than cult brands themselves).
Richard Millington will be speaking at CLIX, 4-5 April 2022, Memphis, Tennessee
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COMMUNITY LEADERS
DEC 21
