Fragrance, cars, pets, coffee shops... How do players in different industries build brand communities? 7 answers for you

Using brand communities to build private domains is a way to live in harmony with users. Brand communities hope to live and progress together with users. However, not all industries are suitable for building communities. This article summarizes the answers to whether the seven industries of fragrance, automobile, pet, beauty, sports, liquor, and coffee shops are suitable for building communities. Let's take a look.

The traditional concept of private domain is relative to the public domain, and essentially refers to "a private traffic pool that can be reused for free."

In this mindset, users are not treated as real people, because companies are only thinking about how to interact with users for just a moment and squeeze out their value.

If you always have a short-sighted traffic mentality and regard the private domain as the "second Tmall" or "the second JD.", you will be bitten back sooner or later. You will be trapped in the lack of traffic, the chaos of product prices, and the imbalance of labor efficiency, and you will be unable to save yourself.

I believe that the real private domain should be user management in the form of "brand community", and the private domain is also transforming from traffic thinking to brand community.

At present, the advanced players in the industry are all using brand community thinking to operate private domains. Companies like Qualcomm Snapdragon, Amul, and Jindian are all making community-based private domain layouts.

In the past, private domains that used traffic thinking focused on attracting new customers, conversions, and repeat purchases, but now these have become standard for private domains.

Brand communities hope to live and progress together with users. In the community, brands hope that users can contribute value in the following ways: new product testing, business opportunity discovery, KOC incubation, content output, etc.

Compared with traffic thinking, operating private domains with a people-oriented brand community thinking may not drive short-term GMV, but it will definitely create sustained business growth.

We firmly believe that the ultimate goal of private domain must be brand community. Advanced players have already started to practice it, and players with traditional thinking should also wake up!

In the live broadcast a few days ago, whether the seven industries of fragrance, automobile, pet, beauty, sports, liquor, and coffee shop are suitable for community building is the most concerned question. I have sorted out the answers and share them with you.

01 How does an online fragrance brand build a community?

First of all, you need to go back to the source of the business and consider the problem. Don’t look at private domain operations from the perspective of private domain operations, and only consider how to attract new customers and how to create content. You need to know the attributes of your brand or your category.

What are the attributes of the online fragrance category?

This type of product sells the mood of life, not the function itself.

Perfumes and fragrances are not life-critical products. So when you build a community for these products, you can’t find the pain points in life and sell them like traditional products.

What is the sales logic of traditional products?

For example, if you are a deodorizer, and the unfresh indoor air is your pain point, you may create content that says you are disliked by your customers or your girlfriend, so you want to buy my product.

But fragrance is different. Fragrance is not about finding demand, but about creating demand. You must let users find the mood of life and provide emotional value.

In a certain scene, he suddenly feels something and will use a fragrance to enhance this feeling. For example, the Kunlun Boiling Snow in Guanxia is actually selling an image.

When fragrance brands build communities, they play with this kind of imagery. You need to find the emotional and spiritual points of users and tap into them.

For example, many people often feel tired at work and in life. You can build a content section in the community called Flow Moments, and match this section with products suitable for meditation and calming the mind. In this way, whenever this person wants to relieve his fatigue, he will want to buy a fragrance with a special flavor.

Therefore, fragrance brands need to find ways to create a mood when building a community, and let users feel this mood in the community to stimulate their consumption needs. As long as this top-level problem is solved, everything else is just details.

02 How does a luxury off-road vehicle brand build a brand community?

Luxury cars are particularly suitable for brand communities. In essence, the more vertical the group of people, the more suitable it is for building a community.

The first point is that people of different vertical categories naturally communicate with each other in the community. The second point is that the smaller the number of people of different vertical categories is, the faster the atmosphere of the entire community will be formed, which is something that large fast-moving consumer goods brands find difficult to achieve.

The third point is that the purchase decision cost for luxury car products is relatively high, and users need to explain and interpret complex product knowledge before they will buy them, so this type of product is particularly suitable for brand communities.

If you sell a product like a beverage, no matter how much you talk, the user will just buy a bottle of beverage. But luxury cars have a lot of room for discussion. How to play with the car? How to explore the technology of the car? How to go off-road? How to form a team in the city? These are all topics you can discuss.

Car companies, especially luxury car companies, must encourage users to create their own communities. For example, let users form car clubs. Such offline organizations are essentially offline communities. However, if there are only car clubs, the frequency of user connections is not enough, because it is impossible for everyone to get together every day.

The brand community can make up for the lack of offline connection frequency. Everyone can discuss the brand online and then initiate activities offline at key nodes.

Moreover, once you have the community data, it will be easy for you to plan your operations.

For example, if you run a car club, it is easy to find single men and women and match them with people of similar status and interests. If you want to run a self-driving group or a camping group, the crowd sections can be subdivided and further subdivided.

03 How to build a community for e-commerce pet supplies?

Like sports brands, pet products are naturally suitable for the community, more than many other categories.

Why is it suitable? First of all, this category is a high-frequency rigid demand, and there is a lot of room for discussion on the product.

For example, pet food, pet snacks, and pet toys, the products themselves can be discussed, and the topics surrounding the products are also very debatable. Even if the business does not build a community, users will build their own groups.

You can see that every community basically has its own pet community. Therefore, e-commerce pet supplies must build a community or a brand community. It is best to build it in the mode of a brand community.

First of all, you cannot build based on product ideas. You must transform product ideas into topic ideas.

If you are currently selling pet leashes and outdoor clothing for dogs, you cannot just discuss the product, you need to interact with users in the community around the scenarios of human-pet interaction, such as how to make it more prestigious to take your pet out, and how to socialize with pets in the community.

If you sell staple food, you need to discuss pet feeding and hair care with users. You may also need to open a section to discuss some service-oriented things, such as pet haircuts, beauty treatments, bathing, etc. Which stores nearby are better? You can make a ranking on Dianping.com.

But such content is scattered, so you can use a small community to integrate topics and turn the community into a comprehensive knowledge carrier. When users enter your community and see a lot of knowledge, they will naturally stay in the community to communicate.

E-commerce pet supplies have a greater advantage in building such a community. Since e-commerce pet supplies have many SKUs and a large volume, we cannot just focus on a single topic. We must categorize the topics and implement comprehensive community management.

For e-commerce pet brands, community building is also a must.

A more advanced way to play is that it’s better not to do it yourself, but to authorize your core consumers to do it.

For example, Xiao Q is your loyal consumer and is very active in the community. You can initiate a community authorization ceremony to make him the owner of the pet community. He will then manage the community and invite friends with pets to join the group.

The goods sold in this group are actually the goods of your e-commerce platform, but the people in the community are linked to Xiao Q. Because this is not a commercial community, but a user community, there is no pressure for everyone to join such a community.

You can find countless users who like to organize things to become your group owner, and you play the role of an "MCN agency". After doing this, your business model will become different.

04 How do beauty stores build communities?

There are two approaches to building communities in the beauty industry: one is the ToC approach, and the other is the ToB approach.

Frankly speaking, I think the core logic of many people working in the beauty industry for doing private domain business is B2B.

If you have many stores, you should first be a B2B shopping guide, teaching customers how to post on WeChat Moments, how to communicate with customers, and how to get customers to place orders faster. You can follow this logic to create a community where everyone can communicate and motivate each other.

So what is a ToC community? A ToC community is actually to let C-end users feel what kind of services each store has, what kind of people provide these services, and what kind of results are achieved.

If the traditional beauty industry is not large, the core is to post these contents on WeChat Moments. For example, why this person came to this store, his skin became brighter, and his weight decreased. They will post customer cases on WeChat Moments, which is a typical micro-business practice. However, doing it through WeChat Moments can sometimes be harmful to customers.

If you put the content in a private community, you can upload the materials to the community, and users can see many individual cases at one time. You can even write the maintenance experience of some members into stories and report in the community what kind of person he is and how he became your user.

Many products in the beauty industry have different price levels. You can also use community content to drive traffic to products with high unit prices.

For example, let users see in the community what kind of people in the city are enjoying your high-priced products. When a user sees the person she wants to be using your product, she is more likely to become your member under this stimulation.

05 Is the sports body shaping IP suitable for building a community?

First of all, the sports IP vertical sports people are naturally suitable for building communities.

Keep was originally founded on the community. At first, they were on a fitness website, pulling people into the APP, and gradually forming their own community.

Why are sports IP or sports brands naturally suitable for building communities?

Because a person who does exercise to shape his body, in order to polish and sculpt his muscles, or practice fixed movements, must communicate with each other and then make progress together. They naturally have an urgent desire to communicate.

Whether it is yoga, hardcore fitness, animal flow, or other types of fitness, it is impossible for students to fully digest it after the teacher teaches it once. Students must discuss the details of the exercise with the teacher and with each other in order to do it correctly.

Therefore, a large number of details here will become people's linguistic materials and form a natural communication field.

I talked to some owners of offline stores, such as barber shops, gyms, and coffee shops, and I told them not to treat stores as assets. Don't think that your business will improve if you open a store in Sanlitun or Guomao. Your biggest asset is your customer base. As long as you don't lose your customer base, people will go to your store even if you open it in a hutong.

So, whether you are doing a sports body shaping IP or a physical sports brand, I suggest you build a community.

06 How to build a high-end liquor community?

Liquor is essentially a social product, especially high-end liquor.

How do people drink high-end liquors like Moutai and Wuliangye?

The first scene is to entertain distinguished guests, and I have to have face.

The second scenario is gift-giving, I want to give the other person face.

The third scenario is when friends come over and I want to make them feel proud.

In view of the purchasing motivation of high-end liquor, the product price must not be too cheap, but also not too expensive that people cannot afford it. It must make people feel a little bit sorry for buying it. People who drink liquor of the same price actually have roughly the same income level.

Therefore, when high-end liquor creates brand communities, they must build them around social relationships.

You must first determine the level of your consumer group. Then you can form different cultural social groups, such as cultural relics, fishing, health preservation, and traditional culture.

07 How can a personal coffee shop build a community?

We have done some research on this category before, and put it in the article "Breaking the offline business: The space experience is obviously very good, so why not make money?"

In China, there are several categories that are easy to lose money, one of which is coffee shops. This is the category that literary youth like to open the most.

Why do coffee shops tend to lose money?

Because many people come here to order a cup of coffee and sit there for the whole day, its table turnover rate and efficiency per square meter are very low.

Generally speaking, there are two business models for coffee.

The first is takeaway, the most typical of which is the Manner model or the Luckin model. To follow this model, your coffee products must be strong, your supply chain must be strong, and your price must be low. Only in this way can you make a profit after deducting the commission from the takeaway platform.

If you are an entrepreneur who has received capital financing or if you are an entrepreneur with strong capabilities, you can adopt this model.

Others basically follow the second business model: selling space.

The product you sell is coffee, but people walk into your coffee shop not essentially just to get a cup of coffee.

For example, when I go to the coffee shop in my neighborhood, I mainly study, work, and have business meetings. Once I arrive at the store, I will stay for a long time, which leads to a very low turnover rate of this coffee shop.

If a coffee shop’s turnover rate becomes very low, it will be difficult to expand the business.

There is actually another problem with personal coffee shops: the customer base of the coffee shop itself is not satisfactory, and basically only a few people go there every day.

It is difficult for you to open a store in a prime area of ​​the city like Starbucks and obtain natural store traffic. For such a coffee shop, you need to use private domains and online communities to let people remember you from time to time and come to your coffee shop.

Believe me, even if you only create a group and post something occasionally, your users will remember you.

The second is small coffee shops and small barber shops. In essence, the biggest asset is not the shop or the space, but all the old customers in the shop and the relationships among the old customers.

Therefore, such coffee shops must be built into small offline communities to establish some connections with users both online and offline.

You need to organize some small activities, such as how to brew coffee and how to taste beans, and consciously make all the consumers of this cafe become friends.

Once you do this, your users' consumption frequency, your turnover rate, and word-of-mouth fission efficiency will be raised to a higher level.

Final Words

If you want to build a brand community, please remember one thing: don’t just talk about private domains. You must first know your brand attributes or your category attributes. When users buy from you, what are they essentially buying? Then match the corresponding community content based on the user’s interests and your category attributes.

Author: Liang Jiangjun, public account: Liang Jiangjun (ID-liangjiangjunisme)