Community

People truly caring & engaging with the brand

Community is what happens when people stop being customers and start being part of something together, and that shift changes what a brand can do.

A community around a brand is not an audience that happens to be in the same place. It is a group of people who feel a shared identity, exchange something of value with each other, and would notice if the brand disappeared. That is a much higher bar than having a large follower count or an active comment section, and most brands that claim to have a community actually have something far thinner.

The brands that build real community tend to do it by enabling connection between people, not just between people and the brand. They give members a reason to interact with each other, a shared language to use, and a sense that belonging to this group means something. This is harder to scale and harder to measure than other brand metrics, but when it works it creates a defensiveness that advertising cannot buy.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

Create conditions for connection

Brands like Lego and Peloton have built communities by giving members structured ways to interact with each other: build challenges, group rides, leaderboards, forums. The brand facilitates but the members sustain it.

Give the community something to stand for

The strongest brand communities form around a shared identity or mission, not just a shared product. Harley-Davidson owners connect over a particular idea of freedom and independence. The motorcycle is the entry point; the identity is the bond.

Listen before you manage

Brands that try to tightly control their communities often flatten them. Brands like Patagonia and Glossier have been known to give their communities room to evolve, and to genuinely listen to what members say, which keeps the community a source of insight rather than just a channel.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Do the people who buy from you interact with each other, and if so, what do they connect over?
What shared identity or values hold your most engaged customers together?
Where does community happen around your brand right now, and who is building it?
What would your most loyal customers lose if your brand disappeared tomorrow?
Are you building a community or an audience, and what is the difference in how you treat each one?

Things to notice

Mistaking a large social following or email list for a community: audience and community are not the same thing.
Trying to manufacture community through campaigns rather than growing it by solving real needs members have.
Treating community as a marketing channel first, which signals to members that their connection is being used rather than valued.