Marketing to communities

This article puts forward three essential principles that need to be considered when practising community marketing.

Marketing to communities

Letitia Hristodorescu, Radu Dimitriu and Simon KnoxUM London and Cranfield School of Management

Targeting communities can allow brands to tap into groups of like-minded and motivated individuals for brand-building and advocacy.

Marketing to communities refers to the shift in companies' focus from appealing to a general mass-market level toward greater involvement with communities of consumption. These communities are groups of people with common consumption patterns resulting from similar interests and concerns. They can be formed around action sports (e.g. skateboarders or surfers), music genres (e.g. ravers or hipsters), common hobbies such as travelling (e.g. CouchSurfing), or...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands