Community Based Marketing Trends 2023

The good people at Guild asked us to contribute to their annual Community Based Marketing guide and we were happy to oblige. Happily, a lot of our thinking made it into the final report (which you can read here) but we thought we’d share the full version here…

The big trends that will break through in community in 2023

We have two businesses active in the community space; VIDA, a growth partner and advisory connecting content and community businesses to media corporates, investors and brands with the capital and resources to accelerate their growth, and VOLUME, a consultancy and studio using content and community to build meaningful relationships and drive growth for brands.

So we look at community in two ways. 

The first is from a creator and startup media point of view. In this space we’ve seen a Cambrian explosion of creator-led, community-powered creative and content businesses in the past 3 years.

The ability - in theory - for anyone to build an audience and monetise it effectively has driven what Brian Morrissey refers to as the ‘flight to niche.’  

But the big trend we’re seeing now is the ‘scale challenge’ - few of these start-up businesses have the resource, capital or capabilities to reach sufficient scale to be sustainable - or investable - on their own - and they are heavily dependent on the big 4 platforms and emerging creator tech for their audience, ceding a large part of their income in the process. As a result, corporate media are starting to explore M&A opportunities for ’smaller deals’ with aggregation and roll-ups of individual creator businesses to address the scale challenge and leap over what we call ‘the valley of death.’

The other trend that has perhaps more future promise than here and now value for the ‘Community Economy’  is Web3. We’re excited about the prospect of innovative, decentralised Web3 platforms and their ability to enable creators to better protect and exploit their IP, access and organise resource & streamline payments via DAOs and to deepen connections with and reward their community with tokens in the future. 

From the VOLUME point of view both B2B businesses and consumer brands will see the value of building and nourishing community as companies slash marketing budgets due to fears of recession, inflation etc. 

Marketing wisdom is that businesses that continue advertising through a recession grow faster exponentially  than businesses that cut costs and marketing in the downturn. What we will see post 2023 recession will be businesses that invested in and nurtured their brand communities will benefit from a strong platform and foundation to grow one.

What does Community Based Marketing mean to us? 

I don’t think we can improve much on (Guild Founder) Ashley Friedlein’s definition of Community Based Marketing, but in practice we’re seeing something interesting. 

In two of our most recent client projects - which indeed focus on ‘bringing together professionals together’ - there are a couple of important points to consider. 

The first is that the reasons for bringing professionals together, the focus and purpose of ‘community’ can be diverse, ahead of or even adjacent to the industry sector that the brand and its clients and prospects are in.

The second is that businesses prefer to view community as an output of their smart, innovative relationship building, through content, client experience and culture creation. So in this respect, community becomes the objective or outcome, not the strategy. 

Perhaps the best example of this in practice is Taylor Vinters’ The Zebra Project. They are building a community of business leaders, creative thinkers, academics and visionaries to explore the opportunities from this reinvention of business philosophy and psychology. This committed and purposeful mission sits ahead of any direct, commercial ROI.

Or take our newest project for a global B2B brand, where the measure of success is not transactional, but rather a number of hard and soft data points that combine in a measure we call ‘Return on Relationship’ 

Will marketing ruin everything that's good about community? 

This is such an interesting question and it’s one we tend to hear a lot. Our perspective on it is really simple, and goes back to definitions. 

“Marketing” has been defined in many ways since becoming a recognised management and academic subject around the 1950s. Every student of marketing used to start with Kotler, and over time he has offered up several, evolving definitions of what it is. Like this one:

“Marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with each other”.

But what almost all definitions share is the idea of mutual benefit; real, tangible value exchange is in the DNA of marketing as a concept and practice. 

The problem is that ‘marketing’ as a term has become so reductive, especially in the age of performance and growth marketing. 

So we avoid ruining Community by staying true to marketing’s origins and DNA, 

A good example of this is the truth that the most powerful factor and major benefit to community members is often not the connection they build with the brand, but rather the autonomous  peer to peer connections that the brand enables with ‘its’ community.

Summed up by this quote from VIDA and VOLUME’s founder (and ex club promoter) Mark Maddox: 

“Marketing is how we get people to the party. What happens at the party is what makes people stay, bring their friends and tell everyone how cool it is. Marketing should be the tool you use to build your audience, target your niche, bring them together for a shared experience they want to repeat”

In conclusion

There is so much hype around community right now so we’ve seen content marketing agencies, pr shops and social agencies all doing a “pivot to community” but getting it just a little bit wrong.

For instance investing in a big editorial and creative team but under-resourcing distribution, audience development and community management in the belief that if you build it they will come.

Or by approaching community like a theme park, packing in endless distractions, whistles and bells, rather than focusing first on why this needs to exist, the experience we will deliver and what gives us permission to do it.

To avoid this, and based on our recent projects, the team at VOLUME has developed our Blueprint Process to build better communities from the ground up, by focusing on the architecture and engineering of the community before taking an experimental and incremental approach to build and management.