Community safety

Fear sells: fear of missing out, fear of being left behind, fear of making the wrong choice. It’s why “no one ever got fired for hiring IBM” is such a compelling argument. It offers you safety and security.

That’s what Sally O’Rourke is offering, but she wants to scare you first. As managing director for Europe at Communispace, it’s her job to convince companies that they can’t say no to having their own closed customer community. More than that; “it’s potentially dangerous for them if they don’t have it”, she says.

But there are three main issues O’Rourke says she needs to overcome when trying to sell the concept of Communispace communities to European clients. For starters, the business is not as well known over here as it is in its home market of the US, despite having had an office in London since 2007. And there’s also a question of size. Communispace reckons the ideal size of a community is 300-500 members, but many clients have already been sold on owning panels of thousands of people.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle, though, is the common assumption within businesses that they already know enough about their customer; that they already engage with them enough through surveys, social media, website feedback and customer service programmes.

“I would have told you the same thing six months ago,” O’Rourke says. “I would have told you, ‘There’s nothing you can tell me about my customers that I don’t already know.’”

New tricks
Of course, there is always something new to learn. O’Rourke uses Hallmark as an example – a greetings card retailer that was mulling a refresh of its US stores in a bid to move itself up the value chain. Hallmark has been a long-term client of Communispace and already had its own community, so when work began on trying to understand the Hallmark brand, its relationship with customers and its position against rivals, the company turned to the community for help.

The community obliged, with some members going as far as to carry out unsolicited mystery shopping trips on Hallmark stores and those of competitor firms. What emerged was that the company’s most passionate customers were at a lower point on the socio-economic scale than its refresh was targeting, so the plan was ditched. It might have brought them new customers, O’Rourke says, but the refresh risked alienating Hallmark’s loyal and frequent shoppers who respected the firm’s lack of pretensions.

Contrast that with Johnson & Johnson, which pulled a campaign for its Motrin pain relief drug and went on national TV to apologise for the tone of its ads after a gang of ‘mommy bloggers’ rounded on the firm.

The drug was being targeted at mothers who carry their children in slings and baby holsters and who, as a result, might suffer from back pain. A number of bloggers objected to what they considered to be the patronising tone of the advertising and launched a counter-campaign through videos on YouTube.

J&J was guilty of two errors in both the development of the campaign and the handling of the response, says O’Rourke: “They launched a campaign without really understanding how to talk to that consumer group and they overreacted.” The mommy blogger campaign caught plenty of attention but in all, only about 180 YouTube videos were made in opposition to the Motrin ad. Sure, each received several thousand views, but O’Rourke says Communispace’s work with its own community at the time showed no groundswell of outrage – though it agreed that the tone of the ad was off.

Now hear this
Listening to the wrong people – as J&J looks to have done – is a fairly easy mistake to make in a world where social media allows for instant one-to-one communications between brands and customers. O’Rourke says Communispace spends a lot of effort to ensure it recruits the most appropriate people for its closed communities, with a team of 25 dedicated solely to this activity. The firm has built 450 communities since launching in 1999 (and maintains three of its own – one of men, one of women and one of kids).

Communispace has 100 customers globally – not enough to form its own customer community just yet, though O’Rourke doubts whether such a thing would even be possible once the magic 300 milestone is reached. The key to a successful community is having enough “social glue” – common ground, shared tastes and complementary interests that allow discussions and debates to ignite, she says. Given the diversity of Communispace’s clients, ranging from retail to healthcare to financial services, hospitality and beyond, O’Rourke wonders whether there is enough there to truly bind them.

Yet its customers seem passionate about the business. It boasts a 90% retention rate, a figure O’Rourke says is not to be sniffed at, having worked with subscription businesses at Worth Global Style Network and John Brown Media Group. Her background is not in research, but sales and management – and, even after joining Communispace, she says: “I don’t regard myself as having moved into research. What we offer is a solution for organisations that empowers them to reach out to their customer base.”

As well as its own customers, Communispace is also starting to work with sister agencies in the Omnicom group, following its acquisition by the marketing services giant in February. Initial partners include Interbrand, the healthcare services consultancy Adelphi and research agencies Hall & Partners and Flamingo.