Marketers love building things. Brand platforms, loyalty programs, content ecosystems, customer journeys with enough touchpoints to qualify as a long-term relationship. And lately, everybody wants to build a community.
I understand why. Getting customers is expensive. Keeping their attention is somehow even harder. Organic reach? Please. I’d rather solve for world peace, thanks. If you can create a group of people who genuinely want to interact with your brand and one another, that’s obviously valuable.
But I think we’ve gotten a little too comfortable putting “build a community” on the marketing plan without asking whether we need to build one at all.
People already have communities. They’re in running clubs, fantasy leagues, book clubs, Reddit groups, professional circles, creator audiences, alumni groups, and group chats with names that absolutely cannot be read aloud in a workplace investigation.
People aren’t sitting at home thinking, “God, if only a regional insurance company would give me somewhere to belong.”
They’re already gathering. Maybe our money is better spent figuring out why.
We’ve decided to invent friendship
There’s something slightly funny about sitting in a conference room deciding how to get people to form relationships when they’re already doing that all day long. The difference is that we don’t own those relationships.
And marketers really enjoy owning things. Owned media. Owned audiences. First-party data. The direct customer relationship. All of that is important, especially as reaching people through somebody else’s platform gets more expensive and unpredictable.
But I’m not sure every valuable customer relationship has to begin with us.
Groups of people are already meeting, traveling, competing, sharing recommendations, and spending money around the exact interests brands are desperately trying to associate themselves with. They already have traditions and inside jokes. They know who everyone is. They don’t need a six-email welcome sequence. That existing behavior is worth something.
We have their email address. Basically, soulmates.
Marketing is also very good at counting people. Followers. Downloads. Registrations. Email addresses. Loyalty members. We can put all of those numbers on a slide and make the arrow point northeast. What gets harder is figuring out whether any of those people care.
Someone can download your app for a discount and delete it in the parking lot. Someone can join your loyalty program because the cashier asked three times and they finally gave in. I’ve followed brands for years that I would struggle to identify in a police lineup.
Those people count. But they’re not necessarily participating.
I’d be much more interested in knowing where customers show up when nobody has to remind them. What are they organizing themselves around? What are they texting their friends about? What gets them out of the house on a Thursday? That’s a different kind of marketing information.
Jessica has 412 followers and all the power
I think this is also where we’ve made influence more complicated than it needs to be.
We’ve spent years looking at follower counts. Meanwhile, every real community has that one person who can send a text on Wednesday and somehow have 30 people standing somewhere on Saturday. That person may have 2,000 followers. They may have 200. They may post one blurry Instagram Story every six weeks. But people listen to them.
“Jessica has everyone’s phone number and people do what she says” isn’t especially impressive in a media plan. “Potential reach of 1.8 million” looks much better.
Jessica might still get more people through the door. And maybe marketers should care a little more about Jessica.
An extremely difficult time for the logo
The obvious problem with finding communities instead of creating them is that the brand doesn’t own the room.
You don’t control every conversation. People aren’t there because of you. They might spend an entire evening enjoying the thing you paid for without discussing your brand once. Your logo may have to be smaller than everyone in the meeting originally envisioned.
We’ll get through this together.
The opportunity is figuring out what you can add. Maybe you pay for something. Maybe you give the group access they couldn’t get otherwise. Maybe you make their event bigger, remove an annoying expense, or create an experience they couldn’t pull off themselves. You aren’t asking people to join your world. You’re making something they already care about better.
There’s a business argument for that too. Creating behavior from scratch takes money. You have to find people, acquire them, give them somewhere to go, produce enough content to keep them interested, and eventually send them an email saying “We miss you!” when they stop opening everything.
Sometimes it might be cheaper to notice that they’re already somewhere else having a perfectly good time.
We cannot keep making people join things
I’m not arguing that brands shouldn’t build communities. Some absolutely should and some have built incredibly valuable ones. I just don’t think “community” should automatically mean creating another place customers have to join.
Before we build the platform, hire the community manager, and start brainstorming what to call the members, maybe we spend a little more time looking at what they’re already doing. Where are they showing up? Who already has their trust? What could we contribute that they’d genuinely appreciate?
Sometimes you should throw the party. Sometimes the party is already happening.
Maybe just bring something good.
