Community, Consumer Loyalty, and Word-of-Mouth Marketing

When a company creates community around its products, it ensures customer loyalty. When engaged in a community, consumers no longer feel like they’re consumers. Rather, they see themselves as guests, members, and participants congregating around a common goal or belief. That change in mindset plays an integral role in up-keeping consumer commitment and in encouraging word-of-mouth marketing.

But why stop there? If community cultivating can serve as a marketing strategy and as the best possible customer care model available, shouldn’t it be able to do more?

Well, it can. A business’s community of fans, clients, followers, subscribers, guests…whatever you want to call them… can also take care of product design.

Peering and Linux

The idea of outsourcing product design to the public has become much more popular with the invention of the internet. It is the internet that has allowed businesses to source the intellect of people all over the world. What we’re seeing, as the Wikinomics authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams describe it, is a “new form of horizontal organization [that] is emerging [to rival] the hierarchical firm in its capacity to create information-based products and services, and in some cases, physical things” (22).

Tapscott and Williams call this new form of organization ‘peering,’ but the act of increasing corporate transparency and bringing in the public to help design and create a product is also becoming known under different vocabulary such as ‘open sourcing,’ ‘crowd sourcing,’ ‘peer-to-peer production,’ and ‘community-based design.’

One of the most familiar cases of outsourcing product design to the public is the example of the Linux computer operating system. Linux was started by a man named Linus Torvalds in 1991. Torvalds took the existing Unix operating system, created a simpler version of it, and then posted that version online for other programmers to view and modify. Some of the programmers made changes, for free, Torvalds ended up licensing the program under a general public license, and Linux as an open source operating system was born (Tapscott and Williams, 24).

Today, thousands of volunteer programmers make modifications to Linux on a daily basis, and because it’s reliable and more importantly, free, Linux is considered an important “enterprise software keystone” for many companies (Tapscott and Williams, 24).

Linux represents the perfect example of an organization or a business sourcing the public to help design a product. With the internet, especially the onset of Web 2.0, with our still sour economy, more and more companies are adopting the open source model. It’s cheaper than supporting a bulky design team; it can be quicker than using traditional design methods; and perhaps most importantly, the transparency and trust inherent in peering and open source strategies are incredibly effective at cultivating that longed-for sense of community and customer loyalty around a product.

Of course, with that sense of community and loyalty centering around a product, businesses are rewarded with increased word-of-mouth marketing and increased participation in product design. It’s a virtuous circle. Open up to the public, allow them an opinion on the product design, secure their loyalties and their powers of advocacy, garner more interest in the product, and ultimately receive more input in product design!

I want to go into more detail on different businesses and companies that operate on the open source model, but I think a separate blog post should be dedicated to exploring those distinct examples. Look for it next week!

Collaboration = Wealth

For now, I would like to close out with a Ted Talk by Howard Rheingold on the history of human collaboration, current economic thought on human collaboration, and the future of human collaboration. In particular, I want to draw attention to the last six minutes of Rheingold’s talk where Rheingold starts to talk about how open sourcing, peer-production, and cooperation, can transform into wealth.

*Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Willilams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. USA: Portfolio, 2008.