From Research to Relationship: Using Communities to Gain Entree into Customer Conversations
Companies are looking to "communities" to gain entrée into customers' lives and conversations and generate timely, actionable insights. Customer Communities, in turn, can be offline or online, public or private, and branded or unbranded. While each approach has its merits, all forms of community fundamentally differ from survey-driven panels in that they allow interaction between members, and enable relationships to develop between members and the sponsoring company/brand. A clear understanding of the salient differences between communities and panels will enable marketers to use each for the appropriate purposes—relying on panels for market sizing and other quantitatively-based tasks, and on communities for the kind of "bottom up" consumer engagement that drives innovation and marketing effectiveness.