[Tribune] “Rediscovering the sense of community, with creativity” – Tribunes > The Emarketing.fr Community

79% of consumers say the role of brands has changed over the past five years. Meaning, meaning, meaning, when the compass loses north, we look for meaning in all directions.

Wrong way ?

Meaning but not (in) just any sense. Paradoxically to this fundamental quest, recent studies reveal that consumers no longer care to see brands engage in facade wokism, particularly when it comes to major causes such as LGBTQ+ rights, gender, immigration, and other struggles for social justice – very good Vox article on this subject here. The 2024 Super Bowl is the perfect illustration of this. After years of advertisements soaked in the same voice-overs conveying excessively emotional messages, this year’s spots marked the strong return of fantasy, escape, and even a certain what the fuck. The reasons which explain this phenomenon: increasingly heavy news, but also a fed-up with these brands which have pushed the envelope too far, by trying to make chewing gum no-gender or by transforming Kylie Jenner as an icon of Black Lives Matter.

New meaning

This distrust of wokism-washing, however, gives way to new expectations of brands, with a greater emphasis on community belonging. One in five consumers now expect brands to unite and create communities. 67% think that the “community” should prevail over the individual. This is all the more true among the younger generations, hit hard in the face by an unprecedented wave of loneliness. Their world has still not recovered from Covid-19, its confinement and the furrow of solitude dug by the dismantling of social ties. In many ways, the signal is alarming: “text relationships” are replacing sexual relationships, which are in sharp decline among 18-25 year olds. Nightclubs, once symbols of youth gatherings, are closing one after the other due to a drastic drop in attendance.

New communities

However, the notion of tribe has not disappeared. If cultural groups yesterday gathered in physical places like skate parks, clubs and cafes, today they have simply migrated to digital spaces, in which the most effervescent minds of GenZ push the boundaries of the quest for identity . 57% of them confess to feeling more daring on social networks than in reality.

Their thirst for encounters remains, but it is changing: thus the ‘Bedroom Communities’ are born, these digital tribes where new generations forge and assert their identity online, snug under the duvet. Faced with their need to turn to autonomous and decentralized communities, we are witnessing a vast movement of Zs towards micro-networks Online spaces like Discord, Mastodon, Steemit, Diaspora and Gab are already weaving the threads of the new IndieWeb, where each community is small enough for the full trust reigns between its members.

New momentum

In this new world of organized solitude, whose curves are being reshaped by new forms of community, luxury brands and their unifying power have a crucial role to play, expected even. For our profession, this is simply fantastic, because after decades of consumer distrust, we are finally seeing a resurgence of positive expectations towards brands. We still need to learn to communicate the new community. Here are some initial thoughts.

Towards less and less “predictable” content, thanks to the community. In its latest report “What’s Next”, our partner TikTok talks about “communityfueled storytelling”. Less and less passive in their consumption of content, users of the platform react simultaneously by leaving visible comments on videos, or even by instantly filming their response to this content to generate new content. This is what we call “unpredictable content”, a social media that is less and less linear, fixed, predictable.

For brands, a real social revolution is beginning. The challenge is no longer simply to generate engagement or spark interactions, but rather to engage in “hot” community creative bouncing, and thus evolve its content based on the response it finds among the auditorium. In other words, it’s about getting out of the creative chamber and putting an end to linear social narrative patterns (predictable content), whose engagement scores are increasingly low, says TikTok.

Miu Miu’s recent social content is a great example of intelligent, predictable content. The brand created a whole series of TikTok content based on the feedback received; a real creative rebound strategy that places the reaction of its community at the heart of its “content creativity”. The result becomes lively, authentic, dynamic, and gives the sensation of a surprising brand, which is built in tune with its time; the interaction becomes real branded content.

This new community creativity can obviously be applied beyond TikTok, in longer and more editorialized formats. This is, for example, what we did on YouTube by creating an episode of season 2 of our series for Lancôme with Emma Chamberlain, “How do you say Beauty in French”. After a season 1 which generated a lot of comments on YouTube, we decided to integrate these comments into the heart of the storyline of one of the episodes of season 2, in which Emma spontaneously reacts to several questions from her fans for more than 5 minutes. His reaction, but also and above all that of his community, thus become the narrative framework of an episode where community rhymes with creativity. That makes sense.