As brand “communities” of all shapes and sizes become an expected element in the marketer’s toolkit, an increasingly urgent question is: How can companies use customer communities to the greatest effect?

When the goal is to achieve deep customer insight and relationship, smaller, private and branded communities are a more effective strategy than large, public ones.  In this paper we demonstrate how smaller communities outperform larger ones in many respects crucial to this objective.

In a companion paper, “Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs in Small Communities: Why Size Matters,” we offer some insight into why small, private and branded communities are compelling—and necessary—for consumers and marketers alike.

Acknowledging that customer conversations are beyond one's control can be both a difficult and liberating step for marketers. But over the course of recruiting and facilitating more than 250 small, private online communities for a wide range of clients, Communispace Corporation has long argued that organic conversations between customers provide companies with invaluable insight into their lives, needs, and concerns – and do so in a much less static and controlled fashion than traditional, one-way methods. Likewise, allowing customers to initiate dialogue both with each other and with the online community's sponsoring company is a more genuine and strategic form of brand involvement than limiting “customer control” to a one-time, closed-ended encounter like letting them choose from a list of flavors or package designs.

Private, online communities offer a unique way for sponsoring companies to actively listen to and build relationships with their customers and key consumer groups. We have observed that community members become increasingly loyal to and enthusiastic about the companies that sponsor them. This original research was designed to explore the possibility that members provide systematically more positive product evaluations as they spend more time participating in company-sponsored communities.