Surveying your community: Benefits and limitations

Thanks to the development of their online presence, B2C brands can now easily reach their consumers directly, without intermediaries. Whether it is a social media fan base, a dedicated brand community, or a customer database, B2C brands frequently turn to these owned channels to conduct studies and make decisions aligned with their users' needs.

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

1. The fan base: the brand's followers

Brands have various consumer groups at their disposal to conduct market research, and their social media fan base is one of them. This group consists of a brand's followers across its different social platforms. Turning to your fan base is an easily accessible, highly cost-effective way to conduct surveys. Furthermore, these consumers are generally enthusiastic about helping their favorite brand make decisions! Interviewing this type of community is particularly relevant for initiatives directly concerning them, such as co-creating a special edition or launching fan-exclusive rewards.

However, this method is less appropriate if you are looking for completely objective opinions. The responses from this group will not be representative of your entire target market, since only the consumers who have actively shown interest by following your accounts will be exposed to the survey.

Other drawbacks are tied to the distribution method itself: publishing directly via your brand's official social media accounts.

• Your study is shared publicly under your brand name, making it impossible to conduct a blind or anonymous survey.
• It is difficult to know the exact demographic profile of your followers and, by extension, your respondents.

2. The CRM database: the brand’s customers

This group, as its name suggests, consists of the brand's active buyers. This consumer segment is highly appropriate for conducting customer satisfaction surveys, such as measuring your NPS (Net Promoter Score). Surveying your current customers allows you to:

• Collect direct feedback to improve your product or service
• Strengthen your relationship with them, fostering long-term loyalty
• Consolidate and protect your existing market share

Additionally, unlike sharing surveys publicly with followers on social media, email-based CRM surveys offer greater confidentiality.

The main limitation of this method is that it does not allow you to reach prospective buyers. As a result, you cannot build a truly representative sample of the broader market which is essential when conducting brand awareness studies or testing new concepts with both customers and prospects.

Furthermore, this survey method cannot be used too frequently; over-soliciting your customer base can lead to survey fatigue 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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