In consumer and industrial markets, value is often expressed through the impact of a product or service on an individual’s lifestyle or business performance. Competitive success is achieved by connecting desired values with delivered products and/or services to meet customer needs. Since much of the world’s business activity has gone digital, the speed of change in product and service innovations has increased rapidly, concomitantly increasing every customer’s expectations. To constantly create differentiated customer value, firms need to move beyond traditional value chain systems and work with a network of firms and customers (Wang 2021). Business ecosystems are developing that enable brands to build a consolidated group of customers. Digital brands (e.g. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Alibaba) have established the most successful and powerful ecosystems. Firms using more traditional marketing approaches will need to shift their thinking about customers if they are to build successful ecosystems. There are two key considerations: 

1. look at customers from end-to-end of a customer journey 

2. identify touchpoints along the customer journey. 

Then ecosystem creators need to find exclusive partners, provide incentives and build a system that adds value across the journey and at key touchpoints, for example Uber (ride-sharing platform) partnered with GoBank to give drivers in the US bank accounts, and partnered with Holvi in Finland to make it easier for drivers to manage their finances and run their businesses. The banks thus gained access to a many new customers and the platform (Uber) earned revenue by connecting these parties.

Ecosystems encourage consideration of different types of customers, moving away from targeting carefully researched and crafted segments to more organic groups of online customers......

Questions:

1. Discuss the potential significance of online brand communities for a new brand. 

2. Explain how tribal marketing differs from segmentation and target marketing. 

3. Choose a brand and suggest how you would create a tribe for it.