The Role and Impact of Online Community from Corporate Marketing Perspective

Community is a sociological rather than a marketing concept until the Internet was invented. Today, the concept has a “socio-marketing†meaning especially with social network continuing to thrive as a new marketing tool in the digital world. Companies traditionally look for consumers who have similar needs and interests so that they don’t waste their marketing mix efforts and develop related marketing mixes for each segment. In traditional marketing, all these segments were generally accepted as passive recipients but not active participants and creators of market value. Such grouped and/or segmented consumers were not even aware that they are part of a homogenous group of consumers based on some artificial attributes used by the company for profit. However, in today’s digital markets, consumers created their freedom zones where they can act the way they want to be free from company interruption. And that is empowering. In other words, the center of gravity of marketing activities has been shifted from companies to consumers with social networks and digital communities. In these communities, consumers are aware that they are part of some common idea and cause, and they are organically tied to each other unlike traditional company-originated segmented group of consumers. Furthermore, while individual consumer is technologically empowered in the digital world, their power reaches new levels when combined with other like-minded consumers within digital communities. Thus, companies need not only understand consumers as their new part- ners but also find a way to develop relationships to be a part of new market value-creation processes in the digital markets.