A brand is a community!

What is a "brand"? How do you create one? Today, the answers to these questions are changing dramatically. To coincide with the publication of Brand Community Strategy for the Social Era (Diamond Inc.), we will gently introduce the new brand strategy concept for an era where consumers take center stage.

Nice to meet you. I'm Keisuke Konishi from the Strategic Consulting Department.
Our department typically assists clients with their business and brand development. This time, we've published a book titled "Brand Community Strategy in the Social Era" (Diamond Inc.). In this column, I'd like to briefly introduce some of the new concepts covered in the book. If you're interested, please give it a read.

"Brands" are essential for companies and products to maintain a continuous presence in society and generate value. However, building a brand that endures is quite challenging. This is because as consumer desires shift with the times and environment, the meaning of a brand's value and the very way it is created also change.

With countless choices available, it's difficult for a brand to continuously capture users' attention and support based solely on product quality or functional features. That's why brands use their names, symbols, advertising communications, and more to create a unique image unlike any other, proposing the meaning and value of choosing that brand to users.

Of course, today, opportunities to communicate differentiated brand value extend beyond advertising. They encompass all direct consumer touchpoints (contact points), including stores, services, events, web-based direct media, and even the experiential process like product design.

Notably, in the social media era, users themselves are beginning to generate new brand value by actively sharing and amplifying brand reputations and experiences, and by connecting with each other. Recent "backlash incidents" also demonstrate that many people recognize how difficult it has become for companies to unilaterally control their brands.

This book focuses on how today's brands are forming direct relationships with user and consumer communities, and how the value created through collaboration (co-creation) is growing significantly (see right diagram). It explains, with numerous examples, how "creating the space" will become a key competitive advantage going forward.

When people hear "brand community," they often think of online communities like Facebook or corporate membership programs. But that's only a small part of it.

Here, we redefine branding as an activity that fundamentally builds tangible and intangible community assets. Creating systems (spaces) that harness the power of social communities—users, partners, local areas—and internal communities to generate value is the contemporary approach to building brands.

As networks connecting individuals become new social infrastructure worldwide, how can we move beyond creating images for invisible targets? How can we directly engage with real, visible people and communities to co-create brand value and vitality? Next time, I'll explore the methodology of "verb" branding as a way to achieve this.