Building Communities around Commodity Products
Posted by Vovici Blog on Thu, Jan 27, 2011
A reader asks, "How do you recommend developing a community for a B2B commodity product?"
A community centered on a commodity, whether B2B or B2C, in the end can't focus on the commodity, but on what can be done with the commodity.
This approach isn't so different from solution selling. For instance, one of my colleagues likes to retell the story of when he, at a prior employer, shopped for a box supplier. All but one of the box manufacturers who presented to his company focused on the box: its durability, its dimensions and - most of all - its cost. Only one manufacturer actually worked to understand the entirety of the challenges that prompted the search for a new supplier in the first place; as a result, this manufacturer proposed a solution that addressed concerns with packaging, shipping and logistics. Of course, that manufacturer wasn't the low-cost supplier, but they won the business through a superior understanding of how their boxes would be used.
In a similar fashion, your community is not fundamentally about the commodity, but its applications, problems and opportunities. A Dutch manufacturer of scissors was losing market share to cheaper, lower-quality suppliers selling through Wal-Mart and other discounters. Now, if you wanted to develop a social-media site about scissors, you probably wouldn't entice too many members to join: you'd run out of topics after writing about how to compare pairs of scissors during the purchase process and how to sharpen scissors. Fiskars took a different approach. They created a community site focused on scrapbooking, where "Fisk-A-Teers" discussed their scrapbooking projects, and of course, how they used Fiskars products. The result? A thriving, successful community, that helps Fiskars differentiate its products in a commodity industry.