Surveying Your Community: Benefits and Limitations

Thanks to the development of their online presence, B2C brands can now easily engage with their consumers directly, without intermediaries. B2C brands sometimes leverage channels such as social media fan bases, brand communities, and customer databases to conduct their surveys and make decisions aligned with their specific needs.  

For which specific use cases are these methods suitable? What are their limitations? And why do they struggle to replace representative samples?

1. The Fan Base: Brand Followers

Brands have different types of consumer groups at their disposal to conduct studies - the fan base is one of them. This group consists of brand followers on its various social networks. Turning to the fan base is an easily accessible and very affordable way to conduct surveys. These consumers are also generally very enthusiastic about helping their favourite brand in its decision-making! Questioning this type of community is particularly relevant in the context of actions that concern them and that aim, for example, to thank the brand's fans (the creation of a special edition for example).  

However, this method is less appropriate if you are seeking objective opinions. Responses from this type of respondent will not be representative of your entire target audience, as only consumers who have demonstrated their loyalty by following your various social media channels will be exposed to your survey.

Other drawbacks of this practice are inherent to the survey's distribution method: your brand's social media account.

• Since your study is shared directly on a public channel under your name, it is impossible to conduct an anonymous survey.  
• It is also difficult to know the profile of your followers and therefore of your respondents. To avoid this bias, you could sponsor your survey with advertising to rebuild a representative sample of your target.

2. The CRM base: the brand customers

As the name suggests, this refers to the brand's buyers. This consumer group is highly suitable for conducting satisfaction surveys such as NPS (Net Promoter Score - the percentage of customers who would recommend your brand). Surveying your customers allows you to:

• collect feedback to improve your product or service
• but also strengthen your relationship with them and thus foster loyalty
• and consolidate existing market shares.

Unlike the surveys distributed on social networks to your followers, these surveys by email allow for greater confidentiality.

The main limitation of this method is that it does not allow you to reach your potential prospects and therefore to constitute representative samples of the population, which is essential when carrying out a brand awareness study, for example, or when testing a new concept with its customers and prospects.

Furthermore, this survey method does not allow for sustained frequency: over-soliciting your customers could lead to fatigue and, ultimately, harm your brand image.

3. The brand community: the brand guinea pigs

The brand community is defined as a group of individuals who share the same representations and values of attachment to a brand. If the notion of community has always existed, it has become highly digitalised since the Covid-19 pandemic, opening up opportunities for value creation for brands. These communities are made up of voluntary consumers, most of the time customers of the brand, and have proven their success in co-creation logics, for example:

• Lego Ideas: the platform for the Lego fan community where they can share their creations and propose ideas for new concepts to the brand.
• Decathlon Cocreation: a community described as "a place for exchange dedicated to passionate athletes who wish to get involved with Decathlon in product design."

This method allows for engaging consumers and surveying a panel on diverse topics at a regular frequency.

However, while this method offers numerous advantages, the insights gathered inherently contain a certain bias.

A brand community is made up of voluntary and therefore highly committed individuals - even more than in the fan base - who are not representative of the entire spectrum of your target: you are asking consumers who have already been won over by your offer.

Finally, building a community involves its maintenance and animation: this method will therefore require dedicated time, budget, and human resources.

Conclusion

While the various consumer groups of a brand (fan base, customer base, brand community) are definitely a source of value, they also have certain limitations when it comes to conducting research. Quantitative studies allow you to gather representative samples of your target, and to gain market share by also reaching your prospects! This is the case of studies on social networks, which include in their methodology the possibility of integrating quotas to easily and accurately gather a representative sample.

If you want to survey your communities or customers as part of a satisfaction survey, for example, it's also possible to hybrid these methods with ours. Episto offers its conversational and engaging questionnaire technology to survey your communities, a valuable tool to modernise your image during your next survey!  

Have a need to share with us? Send us your request here.

Want to learn more about social media studies? Download our White Paper.

To discover our different types of studies, download our Guide.

‍