The goal is to make people feel like they’re a part of something — and like you’re part of their identity. And the payoff — if all goes well — is in the form of fierce loyalty, word-of-mouth promotion, organic curiosity and attention, higher lifetime customer value and share of spend, lower acquisition costs, etc.

Everywhere we go these days, there is talk about community - the developer SaaS tool, the soap brand, and virtually every product I interact with now prominently bears a Community link on their homepage. Personally, I don’t need more Slack groups or things to which I belong. What I want is deeper relationships with specific people where I can be... See more

One of the core needs of humans is a sense of belonging. For centuries, religion, our tribes, our communities, our families have given us that sense, but modern culture, catalyzed by the internet, has broken down a lot of these connective tissues. And so we look desperately for other places for belonging, places where we can participate in some... See more