Community marketing has been generating all the buzz lately – McKinsey even named “community” the big idea of marketing in the 2020’s.

And it’s no surprise given that online communities are rapidly on the rise. 56% of consumers said their involvement in online communities has increased in the past 3 years. And 36% say they anticipate their involvement in online communities will continue to increase in 2023. 

These insights are key for strategic marketers as ecommerce demands continue to evolve, third-party cookies become obsolete, and concerns around privacy heighten. Online communities present a massive opportunity for brands to forge direct connections with consumers amidst the sweeping changes of the next three to five years.

And while community is worth all the noise, it’s important that marketers be warned not to only use community as a buzzword. 

Today’s consumers expect online communities from brands, and the failure to meet their expectations could result in a loss of trust and brand loyalty. Eight in ten consumers already feel that brands are making this mistake by misusing the word community. And 68% of consumers said they would feel more negatively about a brand that fails to deliver a true community experience. 

Meeting these consumer expectations for community are critical. Get the full picture by downloading the infographic here. 

Interested in more?

Sign up for a demo today.

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As economic threats loom and the impending third party “Cookiepocalypse” nears closer, marketers are scrambling to adapt strategies, secure loyalty, and stay ahead. What some have not realized is that their most impactful solution exists right within their own community of consumers. 

TINT’s CRO (previously Vesta’s Founder and CEO) Sue Frech, recently joined Matthew Schwartz on the ANA’s Champions of Growth Podcast to discuss how Community Powered Marketing is the most powerful tool for marketers today. 

Check out the episode and hear Matthew and Sue chat about… 

• Why community is the superpower of brands in the post-pandemic era 
• How Sir Kensington’s wins as a challenger brand with community
• Why bigger brands need to be taking a page from the playbook of smaller brands to build stronger relationships
• How Community Powered Marketing utilizes nontransactional engagement and rewards to fill the gaps of traditional loyalty programs
• Tapping into community for first and zero party data to power segmentation and personalization at scale 
• And more! 

Interested in more?

Sign up for a demo today.

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Our VP of Insights, Christoph Knudsen, joined Pathmonk Presents podcast to talk about how TINT’s all-in-one community platform helps brands secure customer relationships, mobilize brand advocates, and capture zero party data to accelerate the speed of ROI on all marketing efforts.

Hear how brands are harnessing their TINT-powered communities to build more direct, intuitive consumer relationships that fuel lasting emotional loyalty and drive action.  

Also, discover how TINT’s platform equips brands with direct and ongoing access to consumer data that powers greater insights to fuel informed brand decisions and personalized experiences that today’s consumers demand.

Listen to the episode here!

Interested in more?

Sign up for a demo today.

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Along with being named a Winter 2023 “High Performer”, we’re especially proud to earn top honors for “Best Support” and “Ease of Doing Business” in recognition of our team’s commitment to delivering the very best service every day.

Vesta received this recognition in the Winter 2023 Report by consistently receiving positive reviews from verified Vesta clients in comparison to similar products in the Online Community Management Software category. 

From small marketing teams to brand managers at large corporations, Vesta clients took to G2 to rave about their experiences with our all-in-one online community building platform, leaving review headlines such as, “Absolutely the best thing I’ve done for my brand period” and “Great Software, Great Service, Great Team.” 

“It’s an honor for Vesta to be recognized by G2 with these awards”, said Susan Frech, CEO of Vesta. “Our team’s dedication to delivering the highest quality support and expertise with our online community software sets Vesta apart from other platforms and enables our clients to accelerate their business impact.”

“Rankings on G2 reports are based on data provided to us by real software buyers,” said Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at G2. “Potential buyers know they can trust these insights when researching and selecting software because they’re rooted in vetted, verified, and authentic reviews.” 

Learn more about what Vesta clients have to say on our G2 page.

About G2

G2 is the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 80 million people annually — including employees at all of the Fortune 500 — use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews. Thousands of software and services companies of all sizes partner with G2 to build their reputation, manage their software spend, and grow their business – including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, and Adobe. To learn more visit www.g2.com.

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The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run, worldwide.  The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards. 

A winner of five previous Stevie Awards, Sue was praised by the judges for her commitment to advancing MarTech innovation and for transforming the relationship between brands and their consumers through Community Powered Marketing. 

“It’s truly an honor to be recognized by the Stevie Awards for Women in Business,” said Susan. “I’m proud to be recognized among such an amazing group of women and am delighted to celebrate alongside them in their achievements.”

More than 1,500 entries were submitted this year for consideration in more than 100 categories. Award winners were determined by the average scores of more than 200 business professionals around the world, working on eight juries. 

Maggie Miller, president of the Stevie Awards, said, “In its 19th year, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business received an outstanding body of nominations from women in organizations of all types, in 27 nations. We are gratified by how meaningful it is to women to win a Stevie Award, and how impactful it can be on the futures of their careers and their organizations.  We congratulate all of this year’s Grand, Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners for their achievements.”

 Details about the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the list of Finalists in all categories are available at www.StevieAwards.com/Women. 

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We’ve seen how seriously consumers take their ice cream – the earth nearly stopped spinning when it was recently announced that the Choco Taco was being discontinued. So we’re advising that brands take on consumer research with just as much passion.

Consumer insights research should be a continuous effort to help you better refine your messaging and maximize your bottom line. It’s the cherry on top of your marketing strategy – it just wouldn’t be complete without it. 

How an Online Community Can Help with Brand Harmony

Brand Harmony is the ultimate goal businesses strive for – to have your brand, product, packaging, and messaging in alignment with each other.​
​
It’s about making sure that the product placed in the hands of consumers meets the expectations set by your marketing.​

And an online community supports this mission by being an always-on source of insights, enabling you to tap into your consumers to stay on top of preferences and trends, collect actionable feedback, optimize creative, and more.

Emotional Profiling Survey 

To learn more about consumer perception and purchase behavior surrounding ice cream brands, we ran an emotional profiling survey on targeted members of our Smiley360 Community. 

Conducting an associative exercise among participants known as MaxDiff to emotionally profile each ice cream brand, we were able to gain significant knowledge on brand resonance and actionable insights for four top ice cream brands​: Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Halo Top, and Talenti.

Take a look at what we found. 

The Scoop on Brand Harmony for Ice Cream Brands

Ready to tap into key consumer insights to turn data into action for your brand? ​

We can help. With 14+ years of experience, TINT’s Community Powered Marketing platform and team of Insights Experts make gathering key insights easy, fast, and more accurate. Our platform empowers you to deploy data-gathering via an engaged and targeted online brand community to help you make better decisions for your brand. 

Want to see our Insights in action?

Sign up for a demo today.

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Vesta is honored to be recognized for its contributions to MarTech innovation alongside other top marketing technology companies including HubSpot, Hootsuite, Adobe, and Nielsen.

“It’s so exciting for Vesta to be recognized by the MarTech Breakthrough Awards for the efficiency and ease of our technology,” said Susan Frech, CEO of Vesta. “We’re proud of our platform’s ability to enable marketers to elevate their consumer engagement, advocacy, loyalty, insights, and more while removing the delays and hassle of coding. Our fully customizable, ready-to-go online brand community platform is an invaluable asset to our clients to accelerate their business impact by turning data into action.”

James Johnson, Managing Director at MarTech Breakthrough said, “Vesta is delivering a breakthrough solution here. They are providing brands with everything they need in a single platform to fuel new consumer acquisition and build lasting loyalty, sparing marketers from having to choose one priority over another and the headache of using dozens of marketing tools. We extend our sincere congratulations to the Vesta team for bringing home a well-deserved MarTech Breakthrough Award.”

About the MarTech Breakthrough Awards

The mission of the MarTech Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work, and success in a range of marketing, sales, and advertising technology-related categories, including marketing automation, market research, customer experience, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, content and social marketing, mobile marketing, and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 2,950 nominations from over 18 different countries throughout the world.

Find the full list of 2022 winners here.

Interested in Discovering How Vesta’s No Code Solution Can Help Your Brand?

We’ve compiled everything you need to know about online brand communities here. Check it out and reach out to us. We would love to hear from you!

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Through an engaging discussion, the expert panelists from a variety of backgrounds explored the dynamic challenges and opportunities faced by brands chasing brand harmony. 

What is Brand Harmony? 

Brand Harmony encompasses the ultimate goal that most businesses strive for – to have your brand, products, messaging, and consumer perception in alignment with each other. As HCD Research says, it’s about “ensuring that your product meets its promise”. It comes down to making sure that the product that is placed in the hands of consumers is meeting the expectations set in marketing. 

How Do You Achieve Brand Harmony?

As you might expect, there are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to working towards brand alignment. It’s an all-team effort that requires having a strong vision and a determination to bring your brand to life. And while this might sound like a heavy lift, it certainly does not have to be. 

HCD’s panel revealed three tasks that brands should include on their path to achieving brand harmony. Let’s explore them. 

1. Integrate Marketing and R&D

We’ve all been there. You’re working on a project with your head down just to find out that your progress and goals are not in alignment with another department’s goals. Not only are these team silos a big headache for you, they’re also a major roadblock in creating brand harmony. When Marketing and R&D are not on the same page, the product delivered to consumers is doomed to fall below expectations. 

Linda Flammer, PhD, a speaker on the panel and Senior Research Associate at Monell Chemical Senses Center, shared an anecdote of product launch failure from her past that she attributed to ineffective communication across departments. “The product failed miserably because there was no communication at all. It was a complete mismatch of the sensory and the messaging, so the product did not live up to the promise” she stated. 

Often brands rely too heavily on one area of expertise over another, leading to dissatisfaction in the consumer experience. TINT’s Christoph Knudsen stated, “…a big mistake a lot of companies make is they decide for themselves what they feel like their brand means to their consumers and they don’t feel like they need to do the research.” This approach blindly leads brands down the road to fragmented messaging and consumers who can’t grasp what your brand is about- a far cry from brand harmony.

When teams work alongside each other – when the intelligence and innovation of R&D meets the creativity and strategic mindset of marketing –  that is where the magic of brand alignment happens. 

The bottom line: internal communication is key. Without it, your brand is risking its chance to deliver an optimal product to consumers. As Flammer said, “If companies don’t align those silos, they’ll be weeded out and will ultimately fail in the future”

2. Let Consumers Craft Your Identity

Consumers are keen on calling the shots these days. And since consumers are often the ones telling your story and advocating for you, it’s important to be in tune with their brand perception.

Panelist William Childs, Creative Director at Kitchen Magic, stated, “The old paradigm of marketing or branding used to be that advertisers would tell consumers what they are. Now, that’s totally reversed – the customers tell the brands what they are. And if that’s out of alignment, you’re going to have problems.” He added, “I don’t think a lot of companies even know what they’re selling.”  

Childs honed in on this idea, stating that brands need to position themselves in a way that highlights the promise of their product in conjunction with its actual features. It’s about projecting that Harley Davidson does not just sell motorcycles, they sell freedom. Mattress Firm does not just sell mattresses, they sell a good night’s sleep. Hello Fresh does not just sell a meal-delivery kit, they sell practicality.

It’s about knowing the lifestyles your consumers live, understanding their pain points and expectations, and letting that guide brand decision-making. 

TINT’s Christoph Knudsen stated, “It’s going to be all the more important to drill down on what experience you’re providing to consumers that they’re not going to get somewhere else. Get that to a succinct core message and make sure that it’s in every chance you get to grab attention and continually reinforce it with every decision that you make.” 

The main takeaway is that when brands zoom out and consider what their product really means to consumers, it becomes easier to land the right messaging to develop a brand identity that rings harmoniously. 

3. Take a Chance

ABBA may have sung it first, but brands should make taking chances the mantra of their brand plans. When it comes to creating brand harmony, the panelists agreed across the board that it’s important to be bold and take a chance sometimes. 

Many of the thriving brands that we know today exist as the result of a leap of faith launched by brands that were teetering on the edge of brand alignment. 

Childs recalled how all research pointed to the highly successful sitcom Seinfeld being a massive failure. Panelist Stacie Miller, PhD, Sr. Manager of Strategic Communications at Motif Food Works, touched on how the Aeron chair was rejected countless times before becoming the unofficial desk chair of the corporate world. 

These unexpected successes are a stark reminder that even when all signs point one way, sometimes the world turns in another. Refined data points and snazzy marketing copy are only half the battle – the rest plays out in the willingness to believe that your brand can deliver what you’re claiming it can. After all, if you don’t believe in your product, consumers never will. 

The point is, that while the quest for brand harmony might take your brand out of its comfort zone, it may also be the very thing that defines your competitive advantage and sets your brand on the fast track toward growth. As panelist Yulia Strizhakova said, “You just need to make sure you have consistency and alignment” adding, “It will make it or break it for startups or smaller companies”. 

Setting the Stage for Brand Alignment

Orchestrating brand harmony is like one big performance. You’ll have moments where you feel like your brand is the star of the show, and times when you wish you had rehearsed your strategy more. But when it all comes together, you’ll have a compelling and integrated brand story to enhance brand equity and win consumers over.

To watch HCD Research’s Brand Harmony webinar on-demand, click here.

Interested in more?

Sign up for a demo today.

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The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards and the Community Engagement category recognizes campaigns that helped to engage or activate a community in some specific way. Using Vesta’s platform, Veggie’s Made Great has been able to efficiently and effectively personalize their relationships with their most passionate fans at scale, fostering deep connections and harnessing digital relationships into offline actions. 

“We are thrilled that the Stevie Awards has recognized Veggie’s Made Great for their dedication to engaging their community and building more meaningful and authentic relationships with their consumers,” said Susan Frech, CEO of Vesta. “It is so exciting to see how the Veggies Made Great team utilizes the power of Vesta’s platform to drive lasting loyalty and inspired brand advocacy.”

The Good News Doesn’t End There

Vesta’s own CEO, Susan Frech, took home an honor herself: the Bronze Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year: Business Products (11 – 2,500 employees.) A winner of three previous Stevie Awards, Sue’s commitment to making modern marketing more innovative and purposeful continues to draw honors. 

Judges commended Sue’s ability to passionately lead Vesta through the pandemic and praised her entrepreneurial spirit that uses the pace of change to her advantage, leading through innovation and passionate energy to revolutionize brand marketing. 

About the Stevie Awards

For this year’s 18th annual Stevie Awards, over 1,500 nominations from 35 nations were reviewed with just about 39% of the nominations receiving high-enough average scores from the 160+ worldwide professional judges to place Gold, Silver or Bronze. 

Maggie Gallagher Miller, president of the Stevie Awards, said, “We thought the remarkable stories of achievement we saw in last year’s awards couldn’t be topped, but we were wrong.  Women-owned and -run organizations have contributed significantly to the increase in innovation and entrepreneurial activity we’ve seen globally since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The nominations submitted to the 18th Stevie Awards for Women in Business that attest to this are inspiring, humbling, and motivating.  We congratulate all of our Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie winners.”

Details about the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the list of Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners in all categories are available at https://stevieawards.com/Women.

Interested in more?

Discover how online brand communities can revolutionize your marketing in this webinar, hosted by Vesta’s CEO, Susan Frech.

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Marketers are challenged with striking the right balance between transactional engagement and tapping into deeper motivations to fuel long-term relationships with consumers. Gaining a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what their key motivators are can help you hone in on the right opportunities to build engagement and spark action.  

Have we got good news for you.

Recently, Vesta’s team of Insight Experts and Community Strategists surveyed over 14,000 consumers, and identified five audience segments and the strategies that marketers can harness to spark action and build engagement.  

And more good news coming your way: The study found that the majority of consumers are more motivated to engage with a brand that offers meaningful incentives tied to self-expression, curiosity, and connection than transactional-based incentives like discounts or free products. 

Read on to meet these five personas and learn how you can incentivize them to drive action, advocacy, and lasting loyalty.  

The “Energetic” One

Youthful and spirited, the “energetic” one is the largest cohort of your audience (33%), and comprises 42% of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials. “Energetic” members of your audience are motivated by social incentives and are responsive to opportunities to have their content featured, visual motivators such as badges, and access to exclusive content. 

• They are drawn to communities that foster fresh and interesting conversational topics and themes.
• These members may shy away from a community that lacks multiple incentives or emphasizes competition as the main driver of motivation. 
• For the “energetic” ones, offering a variety of ways to get involved is key. 

 The “Opinionated” One

Another large segment, the “opinionated” one represents 32% of your audience and they are ready to be heard. “Opinionated” community members are attracted to self-expression and are motivated by the possibility of making an impact. 

• They love to try new products and experiences, and feel validated by providing their opinions to contribute to product innovation and brand decisions. 
• They are empowered by a community that encourages the expression of honest and authentic feedback in safe and inviting spaces. 
• As much as these community members want to be heard and valued, they don’t necessarily wish to be granted preferential treatment or having their content featured. For them, it’s all about reinforcing that their opinions and voices matter. 

The “Exclusive Access” One

Ready to be one step ahead of your brand’s next move, the “Exclusive Access” members represent 15% of your audience.

• This segment responds to unique and interesting experiences that allow them to get “the scoop” around brand activity. 
• They are excited by opportunities that allow them to get “sneak peeks” that make them feel special and take on new experiences, products, or sweepstakes as an invitation to join the community. 
• To keep these members engaged, offerings and experiences that allow them to feel like valued consumers take precedence over gamification tactics such as the earning of points or badges. 

The “Proud VIP” One 

Game to compete and energized by status-like incentives, members of the “Proud VIP” persona are especially interested in reputational and social incentives. This curious and motivated audience tends to skew younger, making up 15% of Gen Z and 14% of Millennials.

• They enjoy earning badges, being selected as an ambassador with perks, and exclusive access to content and events. 
• Cater to this crowd simply by offering them recognition for their involvement with your brand – feature their content, call out their participation often, and give them new tasks and goals to shoot for. 

The “Tangible Rewards” One 

The final 9% of the community is composed of the “Tangible Rewards” members – those who are highly incentivized by product samples, branded swag, and earning points in exchange for rewards. 

• This population is more likely to be represented by older consumers.
• Chance-driven opportunities such as sweepstakes or other “non-guaranteed” prizes will likely not catch the interest of this group. 
• By promising tangible goods to these members, brands can expect loyalty and engagement in return. 

Though each of these five identified personas have their own unique attributes, by personalizing your experience and messaging to each of them, you can cultivate lasting brand connections and emotional loyalty.

Did we spark your desire to learn more? Uncover more takeaways about each persona and hear from leading marketing experts on how to motivate and engage your online brand community. Click here to download the ebook.

Study Details
This research was conducted via a 22-question online survey issued to the peer influencer community, Smiley360, and was completed by 14,114 U.S. respondents between January 12 – February 23, 2021.

Ready to launch your study? Talk to our research solutions specialists today.

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