Book Review: Building Brand Communities
Authors: Carrie Melissa Jones & Charles H. Vogl
I’ve been told shy little girls become writers. The realization that everyone needs connection, community, and a place where they can be heard, becomes a powerful consensus for a book about building brand communities. This book strikes hard and heavy on the sense of need that allows leaders who understand this concept to build strong and lasting relationships.
The fundamental value of leadership is the ability to build relationships and grow communities that promote and expand a purpose. The implied difference between promoting and facilitating steps up at the earliest point in the book, recognizing the instructional value of leveraging relationships in the place of paid promotion. The mobilization of segments of society to act on a single concept doesn’t require, nor does it offer an option to build community.
Alarmingly, the age of social media has brought about a combination of the dynamics that create isolationism as opposed to building community. Rising rates of suicide, loneliness, and horrific deaths due to self-inflicted harm reveals this truth, as recognized in Building Brand Communities.
An era of loneliness?
In working concepts, the isolationist model of cubicles, individualism, separation of teams, and limited team interactions cajoles members of a workplace into comfort zones of self-isolation. In some books this introverted workplace solution is celebrated as optimal, and yet… Successful brand building with a community structure indicates the opposite is true.
It’s been a well-known fact that congregations who sing together, worship together, and hang out after church for casserole lunches become a strong, united family, with a cause. This kind of community building has been around for more than 2000 years and working successfully! In Building Brand Community, the authors reference such organizations as TwitchCon, and the United Religions Initiative (URI), in reference to the circular empowerment of specific groups of people. These segmented groups include social-clusters come together in recognition of mutually desired outcomes, yet, they may not be the basis or the foundation of the community you want to build.
Recognizing Community –
This fundamental power of actually seeing the community and the reason for building the brand within the community offers a resourceful look at dynamic change action within a platform. Within the platform exists developmental options and the ability to build a brand significant enough to carry through the desired outcomes. Nurturing the supporting and supplemental resources of a community drives ultimate goals. While placating a socio-culture may appear to sustain the association, no community is forthcoming.
I found the intentions of Building Brand Community to be effectively empowering, yet the authentic end result of such formidable principles when used through a non-vulnerable community lacked results — even by the standards put forth in the book. For this reason, the overall accessibility of such a welcoming and forbearing model appears to be more fitting to the dynamic of social clusters.
Internal motivation, fulfillment, and purpose may become the quintessential foundation of a community, but without a sturdy footstone of transparent ethical values, the foundation will crumble.
Reading for understanding the dynamic and purposeful realization of opportunities currently available is recommended. I found many plausible ideas in this book, and actually believe it reveals the causation of quid-pro-quo relationships that have become the overwhelming normal in current socio-community standards.
# # #
4.5