Listening to customers increases brand loyalty. This conclusion is suggested by the results of a survey run by Communispace on 2196 members of twenty customer communities (seven of which were B2B and thirteen B2C) to determine how community membership affected customer attitudes to the sponsoring brands.

Communispace is a company which builds and manages private customer communities for brands such as Unilever and Hewlett Packard. These communities are generally small closed groups of up to four hundred representative customers or potential customers and are primarily focused on qualitative market research. Community members provide feedback in various formats to the sponsoring company and engage in brainstorming sessions. Communispace asked 1846 of these members whether they believed the sponsoring company cared about their opinions, and 89% of the respondents felt that the company was “truly concerned with what its customers have to say,” while 91% felt the community “enabled them to give candid feedback and suggestions” to the company. A subsample of 1107 members were asked about changes to their attitudes about the sponsoring company, and 76% reported a more favorable opinion. A smaller subsample of 360 members were asked about their willingness to recommend the company’s products to others, of which 82% said they were more likely to recommend the company’s products than before joining the community. And 54% of the 937 members asked reported that they were more inclined to purchase products from the company than before joining the community.