Rethinking the Customer Relationship

Rethinking the Customer Relationship

In a world where nearly all customer engagement efforts are transaction-based, it is often better as a brand to focus on the non-monetary benefits and rewards. These are the ones where the brand's uniqueness and personality shine. These are the ones that connect your customers more deeply with your brand and turn them into fans of the brand.

Let’s say Pamela Reif is one of the most influential people in social media and therefore a personal brand. Pamela Reif knows, that community is one of the most impactful assets that a brand can provide to their followers, fans and customers. When a brand like Pamela Reif is able to engage and reward her fans on an individual, non-transactional level, she builds a stronger, more future-proof relationship, and therefore loyalty program, with and for her community. Typically, social media allows the community to only consume the brand's content and send nothing more than a Like, a comment, or a presumably unappreciated DM.

In our view, however, this one-way street of interaction does not correspond to the core idea of a community or fan base. That's because in a market where competition is increasing and the cost of customer acquisition is skyrocketing, long-term customer loyalty is essential. And that's exactly why Berryfy is rethinking the relationship between customer and brand.

With Berryfy, we create an individual community powerhouse for the brand, where chosen members can interact with each other and with the brand. Think of it as your own branded community platform, where you can reward your most loyal customers and fans with far more than with traditional loyalty programs.This happens in the form of a chat function, a social feed and social media-like interaction possibilities. All under the brand's control, of course.

Conversations within a brand community might cover topics relating to the brand, such as favorite or desired products, to a network outside of the brand. The community members interact with one another in this setting, strengthening their emotional ties to the brand and other customers.

This also allows the community to become brand ambassadors, which not only makes customers even more loyal to the brand, but they also talk to their friends about the experience. Who needs paid advertising when you have passionate brand ambassadors?

However, the concept of community building is not new territory for brands. Unfortunately, brands like Adidas, Nike, and Porsche are currently still misappropriating platforms like Discord to enable an exclusive exchange with the brand's customers and fans. However, since this platform is not really suitable for the serious development of communities and brand ambassadors, we see wasted potential for the brands here.

A community can also help a brand better understand the demands of its customers and how to serve them in the future. A community is a real-time, accurate reflection of how satisfied or unsatisfied customers are. For brands, this is a crucial source of customer feedback. Check out our second use case if you want to know how a brand can get valuable insights out of the collected data.