The strategy behind Mecca's online community
- amcm0011
- Nov 16, 2021
- 2 min read
Mecca been able to successfully initiate and continue to facilitate one of the strongest retail online communities. Using How brand community practices create value Schau, Muniz, & Arnould (2009) as a framework, Mecca and its community have a physiology, interact with one another, function like apprenticeships, produce a repertoire for insider sharing, generate consumption opportunities, evince brand community vitality, and create value for both entities. This has been the key to their companies success to this day. In addition, they offering their community cultural capital through positive reinforcement frequent content updates, loyalty rewards, and real-time social media engagement.
The company ethos: “The customer is queen”
Image source: https://www.instagram.com/meccabeauty/
Their commitment to their consumers is evident in all of their content outputs. They create "content to attract, educate, and entertain their customers – not just to make more sales, but because it adds value to their experience and lives". Topics of their blog are of a broad variety, building on their inclusive online persona while ensuring content is attractive to their entire online community.
Image source: https://www.mecca.com.au/
What sets Mecca aside from competitors such as Myer and David Jones is that they tap into their consumer base, again and again, listening and adapting their business models to the needs of their consumers. An example of this adaptation has been the development of a YouTube channel, which now has a vast following in the six or seven figures because Mecca noticed their "[beauty consumers] being incredibly digitally plugged in,”.
Image source: https://www.youtube.com/c/MECCABeauty/videos
As seen in the interview video linked below, Jo Horgan admits that Mecca has a “laser light focus on the customer” with the business’ digital ethos being "honest online communication style”, which hasn’t changed since the business inception. The strength of their content lies in its authenticity, consistency and quality.
Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh_6Xh-qGLg
Facing the adversities of COVID, Mecca capitalised on the new shift to digital and used it as an advantage to properly their audience into the lives of beauty icons. Acknowledging the difficulty with digital and online communities as, “you can’t see it”, Mecca has created endless touchpoints for their consumers and their business to reflect on and constantly evolve.
As explored in Customer engagement: Best of the best (Forbes Insights, 2015), for businesses to successfully market to customers, there is a personalised and ever-evolving effort needed to provide unbroken and highly relevant conversation across channels, whilst also being able to respond to adapting customer needs.
This customer engagement is an area which Mecca has excelled in and will continue to do so. Mecca is an excellent example of a business that has dived right into an integrated digital approach to capitalise on their market share and their online persona, building an online family that will continue to grow with their success.
Image source: www.mecca.com.au
This was such an insightful post. I actually wrote something similar about Mecca’s online Facebook community too if you want to check it out.
As a regular shopper at Mecca myself, it was so exciting to see them transition their in-person services into the online space while their stores were temporarily shut. Given the adversities of coronavirus restrictions over the past two years, it’s shown that the digital space is the next travel destination for marketers. We are in an age where the interconnectedness of everyone is one click away and Mecca’s situation proves that it is important for companies to adopt digital friendly campaigns to continue engaging their consumers.
Speaking of the transition from traditionally in-person communities into the…
Hi amcm0011, your recommendation has tempted me to try Mecca! Interestingly, I am a Clinique user - a total fan, myself. I had a skin issue a few years back and their 'redness' range is amazing.
It is fascinating how consumer affiliate themselves with particular brands. Hmm, let me think about which brands I follow religiously... (giggling to myself)...I had to do assignment a few subjects ago on Aldi. I confess that we shop at Aldi religiously now. It's fantastic and we are saving about $100 a week.
I don't have any children, but if I did they would have lots of Lego. I also used this brand for one of my posts about building a brand community. I woul…
Hello amcm0011, a great read. I am not a Mecca customer, so it was interesting to learn more about their approach. Have you seen how Clinique has responded to COVID-19 with the #ZitHappens campaign? Clinique launched this campaign in response to conversations about ‘maskne’ amongst GenZ consumers on TikTok and Snapchat. The campaign encourages users to post videos about the products and how they use them to overcome their skin issues. I am not a TikTok user, so I can only share the reported figures that the campaign has reached over 2 billion views. Do you think Mecca’s commitment to customer engagement is what sets them apart from the other cosmetics companies? Are you a fan of the brand yourself?