User Generated Brands
The emergence of virtual worlds and consumers’ increased time online presents both opportunities and challenges for brand management. While a number of companies rely on users to create and co-create content, individuals and consumers have remarkably demonstrated that creating successful brands within these user-generated online environments is doable and frequently their initiatives outperform established corporations. These instances are termed as user-generated brands - UGB (Severin Dennhardt & Thomas Kohler, 2010).
Social and other media are used by the consumers to incorporate ‘Situated Creativity’ to co-create brands. Situated creativity is the creativity that underlies production and innovation is extended to consumers, and thus said to be situated in these relationships. Websites such as YouTube and Flickr everyday experience and personal social networking is also significantly supplemented by creative self-expression, creative remixing and propagation outside bottleneck channels of mainstream distribution. This may lead to more and more new consumer created brands which may not have any organization but will be the exclusive product of consumer situated creativity (Jason Potts, John Hartley, John Banks, Jean Burgess, Rachel Cobcroft, Stuart Cunningham, Lucy Montgomery 2008).
User communities also can and do develop strong proprietary brands capable of commanding significant brand premiums. Their study shows that many outdoor communities have created their own community “brands,” sometimes involving logos that are applied to products commonly used by community members, etc. These brands have no cost of promotion unlike the big organizations that spend lot of money on the communication of their brand.
The outdoorseiten.net (ODS) hiking community is officially registered as a non-profit association in Germany. Eighty of the 8,300 members of the ODS community also belong to the ODS association, and a “forum” of 5 board members, 7 administrators, and 15 moderators actively manage it. Although this group is quite small, we are told by members that the community is managed in a very democratic way. Major decisions are widely discussed and the consensus view of the membership generally wins the day. Thus a new brand ODS is now in the market. Community members build their brand and apply their community logos as they wish to. Some graphically demonstrate their preference for the ODS brand by using ODS patches to cover and conceal the commercial brand logos on their backpacks.
Social and other media are used by the consumers to incorporate ‘Situated Creativity’ to co-create brands. Situated creativity is the creativity that underlies production and innovation is extended to consumers, and thus said to be situated in these relationships. Websites such as YouTube and Flickr everyday experience and personal social networking is also significantly supplemented by creative self-expression, creative remixing and propagation outside bottleneck channels of mainstream distribution. This may lead to more and more new consumer created brands which may not have any organization but will be the exclusive product of consumer situated creativity (Jason Potts, John Hartley, John Banks, Jean Burgess, Rachel Cobcroft, Stuart Cunningham, Lucy Montgomery 2008).
User communities also can and do develop strong proprietary brands capable of commanding significant brand premiums. Their study shows that many outdoor communities have created their own community “brands,” sometimes involving logos that are applied to products commonly used by community members, etc. These brands have no cost of promotion unlike the big organizations that spend lot of money on the communication of their brand.
The outdoorseiten.net (ODS) hiking community is officially registered as a non-profit association in Germany. Eighty of the 8,300 members of the ODS community also belong to the ODS association, and a “forum” of 5 board members, 7 administrators, and 15 moderators actively manage it. Although this group is quite small, we are told by members that the community is managed in a very democratic way. Major decisions are widely discussed and the consensus view of the membership generally wins the day. Thus a new brand ODS is now in the market. Community members build their brand and apply their community logos as they wish to. Some graphically demonstrate their preference for the ODS brand by using ODS patches to cover and conceal the commercial brand logos on their backpacks.
Some more examplesCND
Recycle Aids Cittaslow |
FeaturesUsers creating brands for their benefit
No - low cost Creative independence More requirement oriented Logo is democratized More emotional association with such brands Threat to the big brands in future |