The Secret to 'Glowing' Brand Communities
- dcze0002
- Mar 28, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 29, 2021
Are you sitting at your computer, brow furrowed, stressing about whether building online communities is really worth it? And is all that brow furrowing adding wrinkles and creases to your once taut, youthful face? Well, stress no further! Glow Recipe can show you how to liven up your brand communities and your prematurely ageing skin!
In 2014, former Vice Presidents of L'Oréal global marketing Sara Lee and Christine Chang founded the skincare company, which draws its product inspirations from their shared Korean heritage and seeks to create a fun, educational approach to skincare (founder story video below).
Growing quickly into a highly sought-after brand, Glow Recipe has been able to harness the potential power of communities in marketing to create a strong and loyal customer base. Smile.io reports on the many resources Glow Recipe includes on its website to help initiate new customers into using the product. They're so helpful that even novices who've never attempted skincare before (such as the writer of this article, pictured below 'glowing') have been drawn to using the brand!
The key to Glow Recipe's success seems to be their approach to communities. Instead of trying to use paid influencing to grow their communities, they've taken a more organic approach of reaching out to key influencers with personalised, research-based communications, over time befriending them and turning them in to brand advocates. In an interview with Tribe Dynamics, they designate this organic approach as a key technique in growing and sustaining their communities.
Practices such as this are a part of a trend of micro-community marketing. According to Vogue Business this involves reaching out to small communities through key influencers or even creating private groups for certain community members. These groups act as a form of micro-segmentation of a brands' community, allowing a brand to better target communications for niche subgroups or 'tribes' that naturally appear as a brands community grows larger. In 2020, Glow Recipe created @RealGlowGang, a private Instagram account for selected community members, based on research that indicates private forums might result in more honest feedback.
Interacting with niche groups in a more tailored way seems to be working. Glow Recipe has been reported to have created $55 million worth of Earned Media Value across 2019 to 2020, which would definitely make all that community marketing worth it.
- Do you think that a community focussed strategy can work as a purely marketing strategy? Or does it need to be a business strategy that the entire organisation is structured around to work?
Hi Daniel,
Thank you for another thought provoking read showcasing a unique brand.
Building a brand community has to be a business strategy. The business needs to be structured in a way that supports the community and allows people at all levels and across all departments to interact with the community. This approach allows more value to be generated, humanizes the brand and ensures that the community feels as though they are valued and heard.
This approach has the added benefit of allowing departments to have direct access to customer feedback, to test new products and ideas and to be more connected to the end results of their work.
Enjoy your more youthful, glowing skin!