Marie Dollé: "The Real Revolution Is the Ability to Build Communities"
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Digital transformation is a revolution. But why exactly? Because of usage, of technology, of the smartphone grafted onto our hand or of connected objects making our lives easier? Not only that, says Marie Dollé. The change runs deeper and rests today on the creation of communities. Some brands have understood this and have followed the lead of social networks. With success to show for it.
You chose the word "community" to express your vision of digital transformation. Why does it make sense to you?
The concept of community implies a significant paradigm shift. We have moved from a mass audience to targeted, engaged communities. People wrongly think that digital transformation is technological, whereas the real revolution lies in the ability some players have had to build communities and then scale them up. Think of giants like Facebook, but also of others, more modest ones such as Waze and its "Wazers" or Leroy Merlin and its community of DIY enthusiasts.
I recently read an article on Medium whose title said, in substance, "Don't launch a product, start a cult". To back up his general idea, the author used the example of Instagram; he explained how, in its early days, the image company had received 7 million dollars in series A funding while a competitor called Color Labs Inc. had developed a similar photo app and raised 40 million dollars a month later.
Asked about that fundraising, the co-founder of Instagram replied that anyone could dig through online forums and tinker with photo filters, but that building a community was far harder. To put it in context, you should know that the first person Instagram hired was not an engineer but a community manager. His mission? Organising meet-ups so that users would get more involved within the group. A year later, Instagram was sold to Facebook while Color Labs was in the middle of a crisis, because there was no traction among users.
Do you think building communities is a necessary step in the digital transformation of companies?
I think it is part of it, yes. But above all, it is becoming an increasingly strategic issue. We are only at the beginning of a revolution that is certain to happen. Tomorrow, more and more brands will rely specifically on a community that will become an intrinsic part of the product itself. Will we be selling a community when we sell a product? That is the question.
A few examples to illustrate what I mean:
- Myfood is a promising startup developing a range of greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables in limited spaces, combining the best growing techniques with a reduced carbon footprint and bringing together the advantages of aquaponics and permaculture in order to harvest up to 400 kg of produce a year with no effort. What makes this company special is that it is supported by an active and supportive community of Pioneers who share the ambition of transforming the way we produce our food. Every user thus benefits from a database that aggregates knowledge and past experience.
- Another example I find particularly interesting is the Gellé brand. The idea here is to give women a completely transparent say in the development of their products. You start from a need, an idea, a premise expressed by a project leader, and end up shaping a product brainstormed by a community, a useful product that does good. For nine months, the project leader is in constant interaction with her community to help her make the right choices: votes, story polls on IG, questionnaires, beta tests, all the way to pre-orders, which validate the desirability of the product and pay the project leader (10% of sales). And how is all of that financed? Through crowdfunding, obviously.
As Simon Menard, the founder of the brand, explains, Gellé is therefore not a "brand" claiming authorship of the products, but rather a "label" that guarantees their values (sincerity, clean beauty, empowerment, crowdsourcing) while putting its know-how at the service of the community.
Community is talked about a great deal on social media. Have social networks transformed the way we create connections and communicate with each other? Is this a new model for companies today?
For the time being, the notion of community as it is understood on social media is fairly simple. It is about individuals brought together around shared interests, whose gathering has been made easier by technology. And very often these individuals are represented by spokespeople; the famous "influencers"! Most brands are getting better and better at identifying them (when they are not part of their ecosystem to begin with). They more or less manage to communicate and interact with them, but they are still a long way from grasping their full potential!
Read also: Arnaud Rayrole: "Everyone plays a part in transformation"
Yet there are weak signals that speak volumes…
- I think that social networks as we know them, meaning in the logic of a dedicated platform, will give way to a much more fragmented approach, a "social by design" one. Communities will graft themselves on more or less everywhere and give rise to new services that will upend the user experience; that is the case in particular with solutions such as Howtank or Toky Woky which make it possible to create brand communities on online stores in order to stimulate sales and radically improve the customer experience.
- The brand itself is no doubt destined, in a way, to disappear from social networks. It will be decentralised, personified and delegated to its communities. The ultimate proof of transparency! An example? For seven years, the official Twitter account of Sweden was handed over each week to a resident of the country. A large-scale "social takeover", in short, which would deserve to be rolled out by brands on a regular basis and not just as a one-off.
- The notion of consumer research, traditionally carried out by research institutes and their panels, will also be turned upside down by direct access to different types of communities in real time. We are going to move towards calling on these communities more intensively, and there will also be more co-creation setups. Not only within a brand or a community, but at the crossroads of multiple, shape-shifting ecosystems.
What is the difference between a community and an ecosystem?
The ecosystem corresponds to the physical environment: it can be the platform that hosts a community or any element related to that physical environment. A community brings together the individuals who populate that ecosystem, and they are characterised by their shared interests and their interactions.
How do you instil the creation of "communities" in a company? Can there be several communities? Of what kinds?
You have to start with the basics! What are the brand's objectives? There can be all sorts of communities, as long as they make sense! For example, you can decide to build a community strategy with your employees, a setup commonly called "employee advocacy", but if you turn them into walking billboards for the brand and demand approval for each of their tweets, the approach is going to need serious rethinking! What it is really about is showcasing expertise and accepting that people will speak in a way that may be somewhat removed from the canons of corporate communication.
Creating one or more communities: is that how you build employee engagement?
Employee engagement comes through personal fulfilment, in other words through people flourishing in their work. There are plenty of levers to activate to get there. Smoother work, for example, thanks to a more collaborative organisation... or an open innovation approach through a community!
Does the notion of community make it possible to revisit management and make it more horizontal?
In theory yes, but in practice we are still far from it! We need more agile structures with less rigid management. We have to create an era of "peopleware" and that necessarily goes through practices that encourage working in a matrix structure, collaboration and collective intelligence. Yet company maturity on these subjects varies widely, which makes building skills all the more urgent and necessary.
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