A Tribe Called Prosumers

The ways in which brand stories are created are changing. One can craft a perfect vision of a brand, but once it comes in contact with customers and UGC, it tends to turn into something different. The ease with which consumers can generate content has encouraged them to partake in the process of shaping the perception of a brand in such a way that nowadays creating a brand story has become a collective process.

Co-authorship

The rise of social media contributed to the formation of new types of networks involving both customers and brands, allowing for a dynamic exchange of brand experiences. This shift proved that a brand is never perceived exactly how it wants to be perceived and has much less control over its own image than is commonly assumed. It’s the consumers who are more and more ‘in possession’ of the brand, as they are the ones experiencing and interpreting it in their own way. The internet empowered consumers to become prosumers and changed their position from passive receivers to co-authors of the brand’s story.

This shift could be explained by the theory of consumer tribes, which takes an ethno-sociological approach to branding. As the era of extreme individualism seems to be coming to an end, consumers are increasingly looking to (re-) create the social link that got lost along the way. This approach is a method of looking at consumers that doesn’t focus on how A influences or contaminates B, but on the link that keeps A and B together. From this perspective the marketplace is perceived as less controllable; the control over establishing a brand story is distributed between the company itself and its tribe. As a result of this dynamic, the construction of a brand story happens as a collective, co-creational process.

Tribes vs. segments

According to the theory consumers are not static consumer segments, but fuzzy, messy consumer tribes. Such tribes are groups of people connected by the shared use of products and services, who are hard to place in one socio-demographic category and share the experience of the brand. Seemingly contradictory and difficult to pinpoint, a tribe is characterized by the tension between being uncommitted and yet still belonging to a group.

Despite seeming similar, consumer tribes shouldn’t be mistaken for subcultures, as tribe-members:

• can belong to multiple tribes at the same time, the connection to a tribe rarely dominates the life of a consumer
• are characterized by their playfulness, they don’t feel any long-term moral responsibility towards the tribe or its tribe members
• are transient; the tribes emerge, transform and disappear again as the combination of people and resources changes

Open Source Branding

Social media enabled brands to communicate with consumers on a more personal level, inevitably leading to brands adopting the role of partners instead of servants. And as partners the main task isn’t dominating the market, it’s more about facilitating the connection between tribe members and giving away part of the power over a brand’s image. Meaning that it’s not about having complete control over the brand’s image, it’s about giving the prosumers a stage online as well as offline, where they can improvise and create and subsequently incorporating the UGC into the existing business model. And instead of relying on tools like loyalty cards, the tribal approach depends on the so-called tribe rituals and cult places, which could be for example wearing a piece of clothing that is iconic within the tribe or events bringing tribe members together.

Considering the developments in the field of social media and the growing importance of UGC, the image of a brand is increasingly in the hands of its customers. The question is how far this tendency will go in the future. Are we possibly heading towards an era of ‘open-source’ branding?

Feel free to get in touch for further insights and ideas on how to apply the tribal approach to your content strategy. — contact@noservice.today

NO SERVICE 24/7 is a Berlin-based full-service agency for strategic brand communication operating at the intersection of arts, culture and lifestyle.