Community-led brand Northern Spirit increases engagement with UGC

The phenomenon ‘community-led branding’ has been the talk of the town for some time now, and in fact it has become more or less the core of some of our most famous next-generation brands. A great example of this is Swedish workout brand Northern Spirit.

A definition of a community-led brand reads: ‘An authentic brand that is able to create a deep emotional link with their community’, meaning that part of the brand identity actually comes from the audience. This is true for many brands that have a large organic growth, since an engaged audience often equals a large volume of word-of-mouth marketing.

Sweden founded workout brand Northern Spirit has built their brand on Instagram from the start — and is a perfect example of a community-led brand.

“Our target audience is generally big into CrossFit, and within the CrossFit community it’s very common to share pictures of yourself lifting weights etc. which has been a huge benefit for us when building our brand and the community around it”, says Emelie Karlsson, E-commerce Manager, Northern Spirit.

Even though Northern Spirit’s target audience in general consists of CrossFitters, the brand is not allowed to use the name ‘CrossFit’ in their marketing because of ownership rights — which has been an ongoing challenge. To solve this and to give their website and online shop an extra dimension, Northern Spirit recently implemented Flowbox on their website.

“Flowbox lets us reach the right audience without using the CrossFit brand name. With UGC we are able to make it clearer who our audience is, while the Flowbox solution also helps us to create a link between the enormous engagement for our brand on social media and our web shop. With Flowbox we can grow our community even more and it gives us the opportunity to work with ambassadors at a larger scale. With this solution we can collect content from our audience and from our ambassadors and display it on several landing pages on our site”, says Emelie Karlsson.

Many next-gen brands use social media to make their brand more transparent and relatable, which often leads to engagement from followers and fans and an improved customer relationship. The transparence from these brands encourages the audience to share their content, which creates an equal dialogue between the brand and the audience.

The example of Northern Spirit proves the above to be true. The combination between the large number of users who tag Northern Spirit in in their Instagram pictures, and the openness that the brand shows their audience by displaying UGC on their site, creates a unique dialogue and relationship between the brand and their audience that almost only happens for community-led brands.

“We have even asked our audience to visit our website after the implementation of Flowbox to see where their pictures are displayed, which also helps with the community building.”, says Emelie Karlsson.

According to Emelie Karlsson, the Northern Spirit community will keep growing and thanks to the possibilities that Flowbox opens up, great results will appear this coming autumn.

For more information, contact:

Helena Nordh Myhrman, Head of Content, Flowbox
070-4402523, helena.myhrman@getflowbox.com