Throughout my experiences, I have seen the value of building an ecosystem of stakeholders, creating synergies and fostering best practices. Below are two examples of communities built from scratch.
"Good entrepreneurs are community builders, actively involved with their communities and dedicated to the community's well being. If you're dedicated to your community, it will be dedicated to you." - Robert Kiyosaki
Community 1: Casa Abuelo
🔍 Background
Destination Beverage has been a beverage importer and supplier since 2013. Specialising in premium foreign brands for a clientele of cocktail bars, the start-up is also the agent for 11 brands, meaning that they have exclusive distribution and a mission of brand development on the Singapore market. As a marketing manager, the agencies were my main scope of work.
Developing the rum brand Ron Abuelo in Asia is challenging because of a local demand largely focused on gin and whisky. Often, patrons ordering rum rely mostly on a trusted third-party, most likely the bartender of their favorite bar.
Moreover, Ron Abuelo despite being recognised by the industry as a quality rum, has to come up against big players like Plantation, Bacardi or Diplomatico, with not only bigger budgets, but a heavy local presence by the brand itself - which is not considerable for us given that the brand is from Panama. With 11 agencies and limited human resources, we could never have their presence. We had to find a way to have the key stakeholders of the market, be our own ambassadors.
🧭 Problem Definition
To create the community, we needed to create a unique selling point: why would the influencers of the markets and F&B players take time to listen to a smaller player? What's our edge ? How do we convert the community into actual sales ?
📝 Contingencies
Heavy calendar in the local F&B landscape. There is at least one masterclass, one guestshift, or one competition every single week in Singapore. This reinforces the difficulty of attracting not only people, but the right people, to any gathering.
Traditional brand versus new initiatives. Even tough there was a noticeable increase in the marketing budget approved by the brand, it took some time to convince the headquarters of the need for a new marketing mix.
🗺️ Solution
Get people excited about the brand with a quality event. The first item was to create some momentum around the brand, get the industry aware that there was a new player in town. Instead of the usual guestshift or product launch party, I organised a cruise with about 20 influential bartenders or bar owners, and posted the aftermovie on the local bartenders' forum. After spending some time here, I knew that this is the platform with the most outreach for the F&B stakeholders.
Build an exclusive "secret" community. When discussing with our newly appointed brand ambassador, he pointed out previous initiatives that were done by the competitors, and his point of view of the market's current initiatives. Quickly the idea of building a community of expert bartenders was mentioned, making the concept of secret society our edge, and a number of ways to guarantee a conversion in sales.
The secret society was aiming at building a certain brand loyalty from the members, relying on the following principles:
Exclusivity: with only 10 people the first two months, the group would eventually grow and vote for a new member every two months - who would have to go through a friendly hazing
Product focused: Casa Abuelo would hold monthly gatherings, with each one focusing on a certain expression (Ron Abuelo 7 Years, Ron Abuelo 12 Years...). Each time, the members would give their take on the positioning of the product, the usage opportunities, the customer profile and the pricing
Personal enrichment: The monthly sessions would also feature "an expert" from a completely different industry: a graffiti artist, a perfume maker, VR engineer... expanding the attendees' knowledge. This was especially appreciated by the group, providing a change of scenery from the usual binge drinking sponsored by the brands
A shared "secret": For the first session, we kept the suspense going by just telling them a meeting point, an outfit to wear and a timing. Once the group was set, they were given keys for only two existing secret books. Indeed, every month, I placed two secret books containing the rum of the month in locations only revealed to them
Fraternity: This brotherhood was meant to ciment a group of actual peers, gathered around their love for rum but also sharing their point of views about the market
Leveraging the community to identify sales opportunities. The first quarter was meant to strenghten the brand fidelity from the members, and concretize the listing in their respective outlets. With strong commitment from the local trusted bartenders, the world of mouth would occur not only in the F&B community but also amongst patrons: they would be able to find various expressions of this newcomer brand in the most reputed places on the island. Once the credibility built the first quarter, the brand ambassador would take the rest of the year to bring in new prospects, and I would take on marketing initiatives with the outlets who wanted some brand activation (arrange for rum tasting, guestshifts, promotion of a cocktail featuring the brand, etc...).
✅ Assessment
The goal was not the listing of all of the Ron Abuelo expressions in all the bars, but the listing of at least one of the expressions depending on the outlet configuration. For instance, a venue might want the youngest expressions to become house pour (brand used for every drink of this category, i.e. a cheaper brand but which moves more volume), or prefer the listing a more expensive expression which would be for tasting purpose (slow moving but with a higher value per bottle).
As of today, all the rum bars of Singapore have Abuelo products to this day - which is the minimum KPI for any rum brand entering the market.
Unfortunately, the efforts were cut short by the COVID pandemic, so all of our initiatives with Casa Abuelo, and with each of the partner outlets were put on hold. Despite the frustration and based on the feebdacks from the members, I strongly believe that building this community has value for the brand, and that moving forward, there would be a demand for a similar group.
References:
Statista, 2020, Consumer Market Outlook: Spirits in Singapore, Statista.com [July] [LINK]
Rum Ratings, Abuelo [LINK]
"Three cardinal virtues of business: creativity, building community, practical realism." - Ted Malloch
Community 2: Channel Marketing Academy
🔍 Background
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company, coming from the split of the Hewlett Packard group in 2015. The company is divided in two approaches, direct and indirect. The latter is called the Channel and covers the network of resellers and distributors.
As a Partner Marketing & Communication Officer, the only consistent opportunity to meet my peers was during the annual roadshow. However, there was never a dedicated space to just meet amongst marketing managers, despite the consequent amount of people we could gather.
In 2017, HPE launched their HPE Digital Ready program. This massive sales enablement plan included a set of education, finance, consulting and marketing pillars. This last part was dedicated to empowering the digital marketing usage by our resellers and distributors. Read more about the program here.
🧭 Problem Definition
The HPE Digital Ready Program had a clear mission statement and presented a set of new tools that were available to use by the partners. The next step would be to design an initiative to introduce the program to the partners and convince them of its value.
📝 Contingencies
Building a relevant content. The partners are working with several brands, so the ultimate goal is to create a priviledged relationship, making them want to work exclusively with HPE. This also means that they can be busy, juggling between the guidelines of each brand they are working with. The message has therefore to be attractive enough, so that they would take the time to listen.
Aligning the local tactics with the worldwide guidelines. We had to present our case to the regional head of marketing before being able to start anything. This keeps us on our toes, ensuring our plan is aligned with the corporate guidelines, while demonstrating the particularities of our local market.
🗺️ Solution
It is rare to be able to create a complete program entirely from scratch. However, it is also a nest for sharing best practices and bouncing off ideas between markets. The notion of Marketing Academy came from Spain, where the Marketing Manage from one of the business units hosted a one-time session which received good feedbacks. In her case, the goal was mostly product-related education, for the marketers from the resellers to have content to provide their sales teams.
In France, we decided to expand this idea :
Instead of being centered on HPE services to their partners, the session would be a platform to share best practices in the larger discipline of digital marketing
Instead of having a one-shot session, the Channel Marketing Academy was meant to host quaterly gatherings, keeping the content up to date and adapted to the market
The sessions featured a guest speaker on one area of digital marketing (SEO, e-shop, content curation, ...). This allowed to move to segway into workshops where they could apply what they learnt: the teams were asked to pick a card on which would be written an HPE solution to promote within a certain timeframe. They would then suggest a clear marketing campaign, which had to include the use of our HPE marketing tools, and the rest of the room would be able to interact on the viability of the plan.
You can read about our first gathering here.
✅ Assessment
The initiative received praises from our local sales teams as well as our partners, and has been shared as a best practice regionally.
The key success factor was a definite collaboration with the entire marketing team and the support of the channel sales management so that the project could see through.
One aspect that one of the partners mentioned to me was beyond being a platform to promote the HPE services, they appreciated the occasion of sharing general best practices and the learning opportunity. At the end of the day, it is a group of people gathering around a shared common interest, digital marketing, and to enhance their knowledge on the topic is always positive. Before my departure, we were exploring a way to connect with the attendees, creating a LinkedIn group, on top of the webinars and the quaterly events. I do believe this would bring a lot of value, strenghtening the brand loyalty, and demonstrating digital practices ourselves.
References:
Press Release, 2019, HPE Enables Channel Partners and Sales to win together with new ‘Pro’ series, hpe.com [July 17th] [LINK]