Bind them with your brand

By Rhenald Kasali

JAKARTA (JP): "If you build they'll come," says Steve Rifkin, and that is correct. If one builds the right community, people will soon flock and fill up that community.

That was what Yahoo did when it set up a health site in its portal. The Cancer Society that it built started out as an ordinary Internet site, a mere health column on a webzine.

But when it was launched, it attracted countless number of people interested in learning about cancer. They were not only cancer patients, but also friends and relatives of cancer patients.

A friend of mine recently lost his mother to cancer after she was hospitalized for one year. He was devastated. He regretted sending his mother to a hospital, which he believed, was not capable enough in handling cancer patients.

He was sorry because it was only lately that he learned more about the disease from other cancer patients. My friend had devoured many articles on health until he felt he knew enough about the suffering of his beloved mother. But when he did, his mother had already passed on. He realized, though, that the same thing did not have to happen to other people. So he asked me whether there were people who needed the information that he had amassed about the disease.

Of course there were, but how do we contact them?

In pre-Internet days, there was no other option but establishing an actual community. Gather a number of people, establish a foundation, run some ads, raise funds, print magazines or bulletins, seek members, hold actual gatherings in rented halls, and invite doctors as speakers.

What a complicated and costly procedure. Today, in this Internet era, the communities that I refer to are easily established at low cost without any need for ads. Just build the community, and people will come if they are interested in the content.

They are people who are looking for health advice, and some of them may be desperate, but they are clearly not people who are not doing anything about it. They come from every corner of the world. They meet. They exchanging thought. They share. They encourage and give. They cross borders.

All these have become possible because of the Internet, which support exchange by the means of sociability and usability.

Sociability is the support to establish a live community. A community is built when its promoter develops the 3Ps, namely, People (as its core), Purpose (which is well-defined) and Policy (that is accepted by all seeking to join). The people have to have a similar purpose.

The more focused the purpose is, the greater is the community's attraction to people of similar interest.

Off-line in Indonesia we have Trubus, an agriculture community that sells not only seeds, but also a magazine on the subject, and offers training for farmers and gentleman farmers. Trubus gathers the group in actual meetings.

Garden Web, on the other hand, is a community of interest. It gathers its community in virtual meetings. They do not have physical meetings but they communicate at anytime of the day and anywhere in the world.

There are at least four identified communities. They are:

1. Community of Interest, where members share experiences and common interests, and interact with one another in the info space.

2. Community of Transaction, where members actively trade on- line, also known as market space.

3. Community of Relationship, where members share experience and personal problems, and seek support from one another; also known as the network of support or share space.

4. Community of Fantasy where members seek to escape reality or exchange information, also known as dream space.

These communities are a phenomena developed by portal managers and marketers of goods and services.

Portal customers are not like customers in an ordinary community; they depend on the two means mentioned above -- sociability and usability.

By providing a number of facilities of usability -- such as chatting rooms, navigation, interactive dialogs, registration forms, message formats and other support tools -- the portal managers facilitate the establishment of a homogeneous community.

Sometimes, these segmented communities do not have demographic profiles as mapped in the real world. This is why we need a careful assessment and assembling of these communities.

Marketers, too, need to study the communities carefully.

In Indonesia, bosses do not usually care about the communities of interest, relationship and fantasy -- given that e-commerce has yet to find a strong footing here. Only a small number of people in Indonesia subscribe to the Internet presently anyway.

What the bosses do care about is community of transaction whose members are customers with a certain buying power, and a willingness to spend.

But those venturing to dig this gold mine would be well- advised to remember that transactions could also be made in the other three communities.

Those communities are real, and as Harley Davidson had done in the real world, marketers could develop their own community-based marketing.

Therefore, do not let those communities become enemies of your product, but bind them with your brand as Harley Davidson had.

The writer is head of Management Studies Program at the University of Indonesia's Postgraduate School, a business consultant and columnist.