••••May 30, 2017

A LOOK AT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ONLINEBRAND COMMUNITIESOnline brand communities are driving authentic engagement, fostering innovation, breeding brand advocates and increasingconversion to sales and customer loyalty. Here, Beauty Insider looks at how leading brands are reaping substantial benefits.

Not all thriving online communities live on social media platforms. In fact, some leading brands are benefiting hugely fromactive and engaged communities on their own web platforms, and are doing so in ways that complement their social mediaendeavors.

Online brand communities are quite simply communities that are integrated within a brand’s website. They are close to thebrand, and are managed directly by the brand.

For consumers, brand communities add genuine value to their lives. They are places where like-minded individuals canconnect, create, share content, find information, ask questions, offer peer-to-peer advice, leave reviews, trade success storiesand generally feel like they are being heard by a brand. Exceptional brand communities place members in the center of theirbrand universe, as opposed to being venues where brands can push out content.

For brands, a community that resides on its own web platform enables brands to cultivate deeper relationships with itsmembers. Highly engaged members become brand advocates, a holy grail for marketers. Communities that thrive on brandowned properties also provide access to a wealth of user data that cannot be gleaned on social media platforms, for example,insights gained when customer accounts are linked to loyalty cards and social media.

Sephora’s BeautyTalk platform gives members the opportunity to meaningfully connect with each other. The retailerlaunched the platform in 2010 when it discovered that customers wanted to talk to each other, in addition to submittingratings and reviews. While people were engaging on Facebook and exchanging plenty of beauty information, days later thoseconversation threads were buried and all but lost. Enter Beauty Talk, the community that Sephora built to be the repositoryfor the wealth of information being shared.

Beauty Talk makes sharing easy. Visitors can easily search for content, join a conversation, browse for tips or make a

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recommendation. They can “Ask the Experts” or initiate conversations on Beauty Insider. Beauty Talk also incorporates agamification feature: when members participate in conversations, they earn hearts. Sephora further incentivizes engagementvia playful Beauty Profile Titles, such as Hall of Famer, Beauty Guru, Beauty Boss and Beauty Connoisseur. Customers riseup the community ranks based on how frequently they contribute and the quality of the content.

Today, Beauty Talk hosts more than one million user posts and replies, and between 40,000 to 70,000 people are logged intothe community at any point in time. Beauty Talk’s super-fans spend 10 times more time on Sephora’s website thancommunity members, while community members spend twice as much time as average customers on Sephora.com, accordingto Lithium, the agency that built Sephora’s engagement platform.

In Glossier’s case, its community platform Into The Gloss, which began as a blog in 2010, preceded the advent of the brandby four years. Into The Gloss currently boasts more than 1.5 million unique views per month. Its Open Thread featureregularly solicits reader opinion, like a live focus group, with a broad mix of questions such as, What’s your weirdest beautytrick?, What’s your perfect heavy-duty moisturizer?, and Beauty chemistry 101: Which products do you mix? In fact,Glossier states that its very first product, Milky Jelly Cleanser, was a collaborative effort that began when the brand asked itscommunity to describe its dream face wash.

Glossier continues to listen closely to its community (founder Emily Weiss views every woman as an influencer), andharnesses its hugely passionate fan base as a driving force in innovation and product development.

Clearly, open discussion doesn’t come without risk, whether on social media or in an online brand community. How brandshandle negative content, and whether they resist the urge to edit criticism, will ultimately determine the trustworthiness ofthat community in consumers’ eyes.

Earnest customer reviews are pervasive on Glossier’s site, further enhancing the diversity and real value of the brand’scommunity. The site is populated with a huge wealth of customer reviews, good and sometimes bad, and it is a measure ofGlossier’s boldness and strength that it continues its phenomenal growth without needing to censor less-than-favorablereviews.

Authenticity, after all, is the preeminent currency in today’s digital world.

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