Firms increasingly provide their customers with online communities to foster social interactions amongst them. Our industry partner operates an online community platform where users share their cooking experience. The users offer recipes for others, discuss, evaluate and give feedback. The main goal of the project was to show the value of the online community. To reach the goal, we first conducted a detailed analysis of the community evolution and derived actionable insights into the community development and cross-country differences. Secondly, we segmented all users into three groups, identified the influencers in each group and showed how each type of influencers can contribute to increasing the community value in a different way. In the last step, we co-designed together with our partner a focus group to better understand the motivation and expectations of the identified influencers and how to leverage their knowledge to create high quality products.

Authors: René Algesheimer, Radu Tanase and Sébastien Caduff