Questioning your community: benefits and limits

Thanks to the development of their online presence, BtoC brands can now easily reach their consumers, without intermediaries. Fan base on social media, brand communities, customer base... it is towards these types of channels that BtoC brands sometimes turn to conduct their studies and make decisions consistent with their needs.

For what specific cases are these methods suitable? What are their limitations? And why do they struggle to replace representative samples?

1. The fan base: the brand's followers

Brands have different types of consumer groups at their disposal to conduct studies - the fan base is one of them. This group consists of the followers of a brand on its various social media. Turning to one's fan base is an easily accessible and very low-cost method to conduct surveys. These consumers are also generally very enthusiastic about helping their favorite brand in its decision-making! Interviewing this type of community is particularly relevant in the context of actions concerning them, such as thanking the brand's fans (like the creation of a special edition, for example).

This method is less appropriate if you are looking for objective opinions. The responses from this type of respondents will not be representative of your entire target audience, since only the consumers who have shown their attachment by following your various social media will be exposed to your survey.

Other drawbacks of this practice are specific to the distribution method of your survey: your brand's account on social media.

• Your study is here shared directly on a public channel in your name, and it is impossible for you to conduct a survey anonymously.
• It's also difficult to know the profile of your followers and thus your respondents. While to avoid this bias, you could sponsor your survey with advertising to rebuild a representative sample of your target.

2. The CRM database: the brand’s customers

This group, as its name suggests, consists of the brand's buyers. This group of consumers is quite appropriate for conducting satisfaction surveys such as NPS (Net Promoter Score - the percentage of customers who would recommend your brand). Surveying your customers allows you to:

• collect feedback to improve your product or service
• but also strengthen your relationship with them and therefore foster their loyalty
• and consolidate market shares you hold.

Also, unlike surveys distributed on social media to your followers, these email surveys allow for greater confidentiality.

The main limitation of this method is that it does not allow you to reach potential prospects and therefore construct representative samples of the population, which is essential when conducting a brand awareness study, for example, or testing a new concept with your customers and prospects.

This mode of survey does not allow for sustained frequency: over-soliciting your customers could bore them and, in the long run, harm your brand image.

3. The brand community: the brand's "guinea pigs"

The brand community is defined as a group of individuals who share the same representations and values of attachment to a brand. While the notion of community has always existed, it has become heavily digitalized since the Covid-19 pandemic, thus opening up value creation opportunities for brands. These communities are thus made up of voluntary consumers, mostly brand customers, and have proven successful in co-creation logic, for example:

• Lego Ideas: the platform for the community of LEGO fans where they can share their creations and propose their ideas for new concepts to the brand.
• Decathlon Cocreation : a community described as "a place for exchanges dedicated to passionate athletes who wish to get involved with Decathlon in product design."

This method allows for engaging consumers and querying a panel on various topics at a regular frequency.

However, while this method offers many advantages, the insights gathered come with a certain bias.

A brand community is made up of volunteer individuals who are therefore highly engaged – even more than in the fan base – who are not representative of the full spectrum of your target: you are querying consumers who are already won over by your offer!

Finally, building a community requires maintenance and engagement: this method will therefore require time, budget, and dedicated human resources.

Conclusion

While the different consumer groups of a brand (fan base, customer base, brand community) are definitely a source of value creation, they also present certain limitations in the context of conducting studies. Quantitative studies allow you to gather representative samples of your target and gain market share by also reaching your prospects! This is the case with studies on social networks, which incorporate into their methodology the possibility of integrating quotas to easily and accurately gather a representative sample.

If you wish to query your communities or your clients in the context of a satisfaction survey, for example, it is also possible to hybridize these methods with ours. Episto offers its conversational and engaging questionnaire technology to query your communities, a valuable tool to modernize your image during your next survey!  

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