Enabling people to achieve more … Brands used to be marks of ownership, but today are built around the passions of like-minded consumers, enabling them to achieve more, and multiply their impact.

March 18, 2023

Cycling is a sport of connoisseurs. They love their coffee, in France they love their pastis, and they love their bikes and gear.

Riding at the heart of a Sunday morning peloton is as much social as physical, and so Rapha designed to create premium cycling gear, and coffee shops – or Cycle Clubs – where enthusiasts can meet.

Walk into a Rapha Cycle Clubs – in London or New York, Sydney or Osaka – and you can see, smell and touch a love of cycling. Rapha, founded in London’s Covent Garden by Simon Mottram in 2004, has grown rapidly, building a direct relationship with consumers, through events and online community, as well as its coffee-shop stores. There are also line extensions into luggage, skincare, books and travel, plus a co-branded range with designer and cycling enthusiast Paul Smith.

Rapha is a brand that polarises opinion. For some it has created the ultimate in high performance equipment, dedicated to a sport that breeds passion and perspiration. For others, it is over-priced and over-designed vanity wear for middle-aged men who squeeze into their posh lycra for a weekend ride. Whichever your view, it gets talked about. Especially items such as the $450 pair of yak-leather cycling shoes, or the $150 pro-glide coffee tamper, to flatten your coffee like the best baristas after your run.

Enabling more

Microsoft seeks to “empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more”, or as Satya Nadella says, “to make other people cool, not ourselves”.

I worked with Microsoft to help them achieve this with business customers. Traditionally sales and technology experts had gone out to clients seeking to sell products, or in today’s model, subscriptions. It was largely product push, with diminishing returns. We stepped back and asked how can we help clients to achieve more?

The transformation was to help them do what they want to do – to reach new markets, innovate new solutions, transform their own businesses. Instead of a relationship starting with a list of product options, we started by listening, and then together using the combined expertise and ideas of what is possible, to develop a new plan for growth.

If a brand is about what it enables people to do, rather than what it does, then it follows that a great brand enables people to achieve even more than they could imagine, or to do so in a better way, with greater success.

Enablement has become a key word in branding. Brands do more for their customers in three primary ways

Educating people: helping customers to learn how to use and apply their products and services in better ways, to get the best out of them.
Enabling people: collaborating with customers to achieve more, using products better, changing how they work, to do more.
Enhancing people: adding to the solution of customers, adding new ideas from other places, and transforming their own performance levels.

Apple stores are busier with education workshops – how to create better sales presentation, build a better website for your business, do your tax return correctly – than people seeking to buy or repair their devices. Lululemon yoga wear stores are transformed into yoga studios at regular intervals during the day, a place to do what you love, not just to prepare for it. M&C Saatchi ad agency has rooms for each of its clients, dedicated to their brands and campaigns, where they can work together as joint teams.

Building a brand community

A brand community is a group of consumers who invest in a brand beyond what is being sold.

Think about some of the great examples of brand communities through which people engage with brands and businesses today, influencing what they buy, who they trust, and how they achieve more. From Lego Ideas to TED Talks, Xbox Ambassadors to Nike’s Run Club, Disney’s D23 Fans to Bayern Munich’s supporter’s club.

Here are some of the most famous:

Harley Owners Group: recognised that owners loved much more than the bike, it was the freedom to ride the roads, the thrill to ride together, to hang out at Ace Cafes, to share their passion for life.
Glossier: became the world’s fastest growing beauty business, emerging out of a Vogue editor’s blog followers, to become a community where consumers share ideas and advice, but also co-create their products.
Lego Ideas: about more than colourful plastic blocks, Lego is derived from the Danish for “creative play”. It is about creative development and expression, which is why its online community is a vibrant space for contests, photos and new ideas.
Behance: Adobe’s platform for showcasing and discovering great creative work now has over 10 million participants, both professional designers and amateurs, including exclusive tools and project collaboration spaces.
Spotify Rockstars: bringing together people who love music, encouraging discussion and recommendations, rewarding and ranking the most active, and also a platform for discovering new talent.

Communities built on passions

From meaningful consumer retention to new sources of revenue, unfiltered consumer insight and predictable cashflows, branded communities offer many opportunities for a business to drive growth:

Enhance consumer experiences – how people achieve more, collaborate and recommend, and create new content together.
Ongoing engagement – how people engage with brands continuously, not just at moments of promotion or purchase.
Know consumers better – 67% of businesses use communities to gain deeper insights to drive better focus and innovation.
Increase brand exposure and credibility, making it easier to sell without selling – typically 35% increase in brand awareness.
Reduce consumer support costs – 49% of businesses with online communities report cost savings of around 25% annually.
Improve retention and advocacy – improving retention by 42%, tripling cross-selling, and people pay more too.

Building a great brand community has three foundations:

Consumer: starting with your target audience, with a captivating reason for members to join the “tribe”, be it a shared cause or interest, from hip-hop music, to a love of science fiction novels, or a desire to get fit.
Collaboration: engaging with other people, facilitated by the brand and its community platform, which might take the form of discussions, co-creation and recommendations.
Content: the glue that makes the community work beyond products. These might take the form of newsletters, events, videos, other products, discussion boards, merchandise, exclusive offers, and much more.

Underpinning this is a business model that ensures that the community adds real value to its members, but also commercially works for the organisation. For members, this means it adds value beyond the brand’s conventional products and services, typically enabling them to use them better, and get more from them. For business, this means having a business model that drives incremental revenue growth. This might be in the form of consumer retention, selling more or different products, but also other types of content, and potentially a subscription to belong.

Communities are one of the most powerful ways a brand can grow, often exponentially.

Excerpt from “Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk

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