Over the past decade brands became exceptionally good at getting attention. Optimising for reach and impressions, they prioritised viral cultural moments: on the one hand, you had American fast-food chain Wendy's running an incendiary Twitter account; on the other, you had brands racing to coopt hashtags or insert themselves into meme culture, sometimes to disastrous results.
The result was brands talking at consumers and calling it engagement. People got wise to it.
Far from the promise of authentic connection, social platforms became venues of passive consumption.
Too often brand community is treated as a marketing channel, to amplify campaigns, leverage creators or drive engagement around tentpole moments like major league sports, music festivals and celebrity events.
But the strongest communities do something deeper. They make people feel they have a stake in the brand itself. Not ownership in a literal but an emotional sense - emotional equity. A feeling that the brand reflects them, includes them and is part of their life and identity.
That changes the relationship entirely. People return to brands they feel a part of.
One of the clearest findings from our Hidden Women research was that women rarely rely on a single community. Instead, they move between multiple spaces serving different emotional and practical needs. (The full report can be found here.) A woman might go to Reddit for honest financial advice, a run club for accountability, a WhatsApp group for emotional support, and a creator-led beauty community for recommendations she trusts more than advertising.
This indicates that communities of all kinds can have strong salience among certain groups. So how do brands unlock growth through community?
We'll answer this question in two ways. Through the deep research we've conducted on which brands connect with women consumers, looking to the top-performing brand in the study as a model for a successful brand community strategy.
Then, we'll explore a brand that's managed to find a novel way to engage with existing digital communities where enthusiasm is still high and engagement is genuine and participatory — highlighting ways to involve consumers not only in marketing, but in operations like R&D.
But first, we'll answer an important question: what is community, really?
Community is built on return
In the simplest terms, community is where people show up repeatedly for a shared purpose or goal. Anything from a run club to a subreddit for figurine collectors comprises a community; so does a group chat, a book club, a Dungeons & Dragons party, a Slack channel for women professionals.
Importantly, there's an element of exclusivity to communities. Not in an elite sense (though certainly some hobbies and interests are less accessible than others), but in the sense that there are shared stakes: to show up repeatedly is to be a part of a collective effort, and to fail to show up is to risk losing something of value.
For example, members of run clubs are invested in one another's fitness progress; they encourage one another, and with their presence turn exercise into a social gathering rather than an undertaking.
Meanwhile, a Dungeons & Dragons group simply can't progress through the story if nobody shows up to the table. Collectors on Reddit learn from one another's collections; showcasing an exciting new acquisition is a teaching moment for those new to the hobby, and an occasion for congratulations among those in the know.
Brands, therefore, must adopt a community strategy that is not about broadcasting a message to an audience, but about being a part of their conversation. Not by parroting their memes or trying to grab their attention in flashy moments, but by showing up like any other member of the community does: finding a real way to contribute, and doing so consistently.
Unlike audiences, communities notice when people stop showing up. Brands have to behave like participants, understanding the rules of engagement and creating value.
We know this because that's what the research told us.
How successful brands support women's communities
Among the most revealing aspects of our Hidden Women study was the importance of community. We conducted a survey of 2,700 women ages 16 to 74 across North America to measure how well brands understood women's lives, considered their needs, and delivered value.
According to the research, the best-performing brands aren't just getting women's attention; they've earned a place in women's lives by showing up repeatedly, removing friction, and making women feel genuinely considered rather than targeted.
Notably, among our categories, sport performed best. We asked women to score brands in terms of how well each understood women’s lives, considers their needs and delivers value; five of the top 10 were sports brands, such as Nike, Vuori, and Athleta.
As an activity, sport and fitness is uniquely conducive to community. People are more comfortable talking to one another when they're moving and increasing their endorphins, allowing conversation to flow effortlessly. That's why so many people who move to new cities join run clubs: it's a fast track to meeting new, likeminded people.
What's more, a huge number of people prioritise fitness and make it a part of everyday life. So not only is it improving your physical health and wellbeing; it also aids social and mental health, too.
To understand how brands can authentically engage in this, we'll look at the highest-rated brand in our study: Alo.
How Alo's community strategy drove brand growth
Among the brands we asked women to rank, Alo ranked number one overall and was in the top two across all age groups. So how did they achieve this? We asked former Director of Community Brittany Louks in a webinar (available here). What stood out were three things:
A clear mission makes for a natural community
Alo didn’t build community as a marketing layer, it built community into how the brand operated. Alo's founding mission was to "bring yoga to the world." And so every community event that the company ran centred on that mission: complementary yoga classes; breathwork workshops; sound baths. These events drew curious participants who became not only loyal customers, but community members who would show up to the next event, and the next one after that.
When the brand evaluated a partnership, an event, or an activation, the question was always whether it connected back to that core purpose. If a proposed event didn't "bubble back to that mission statement," Louks says, "then it's a no."
That kind of discipline is harder than it sounds, especially for a brand gaining momentum. The temptation is to say yes to every collaboration that offers reach. But misaligned collaborations risk scrambling potential customers' expectations of what the brand will provide them, disincentivising them from coming to the next event.
What's more, on an individual level, Alo understood that community cohesion depends on people knowing what they're part of. A clear mission gives members a shared, self-reinforcing identity. Women seeing other women wearing Alo know that they have something in common.
Big moments only matter when brands show up for the small ones
Every touch point builds connection, whether a brand's preferred metrics reflect it or not. An interested yogi might become a lifelong customer after attending a workshop; this result won't necessarily show up through purchase, but the event created loyalty.
Tentpole moments only work when there is already a rhythm underneath them. A festival activation matters more when people already know the brand. A creator partnership lands harder when audiences already trust the relationship. A flagship event works because smaller moments created familiarity first.
Community is what gives large moments emotional carryover. Without that foundation, even successful activations disappear quickly from memory.
A brand may even have customers providing input on what else they can do for them. Louks recalls a musician asking the company to put on a breathwork class; from there, Alo became involved with musicians, a space they hadn't yet considered.
This steady momentum, where brands enter into various communities led by genuine affinity, is what leads to signing a brand ambassador with a genuine connection to a strong local scene; sponsoring events that the communities look forward to together; or showing up at a large-scale festival in a way that adds to the experience.
Community consistency is a retention strategy
Many brands still treat community primarily as an acquisition strategy. But its real value often shows up later. Retention. When consumers feel emotionally invested in a brand, when they repeatedly participate, recognise others, and feel recognised themselves, switching brands becomes harder.
Counterintuitively, community doesn't necessarily take years to build. A single experience that lands exactly right can create the spark. But the spark is just the beginning. Community is cumulative, seeing or speaking to the same people regularly. Like any community member, the brand must be recognisable from one event to the next.
"When you switch it up too much,” Louks says, “or you try to do something different because you think, ‘Okay, now we have this amount of people, so now let's try something different’ — that's not the way to do it.” Community can happen overnight, over years, or anywhere in between, as long as engagement is consistent.
The same is true for a brand’s digital strategy. If a brand’s presence on a social platform serves to keep the community updated on upcoming in-person events, brands should ensure that the community can expect that service indefinitely. And, of course, stay on brand: “If you're over-indexing on content and you're confusing your audience all the time by putting things out there that might not necessarily be brand aligned, it's not gonna work."
To build a brand community, or join an existing one?
As the demand for communities has continued to rise, communities have themselves come to take many different shapes. This gives innovative brands a world of opportunities.
A recent example: the Vaseline Verified programme. Vaseline identified more than 3.5 million "Vaseline hacks": innovative uses of petroleum jelly for unexpected applications. Boiling and diluting Vaseline for a skincare solution. Applying Vaseline to a camera lens for a "soft focus" effect. Using Vaseline to lubricate door hinges and other joints, or polish furniture.
The brand took some of the more novel uses to their own scientists and had them put each ‘hack’ to the test. The hacks that turned out to be scientifically verifiable were dubbed "Vaseline Verified": a stamp of approval from the brand.
Some even became the inspiration for new Vaseline products. The original users who posted the hacks for these products were given affiliate links to share with the community so they could profit from their innovations.
Most brands treat community as a marketing channel: a way to get existing products in front of more people. Vaseline inverted the dynamic. The community became part of the R&D process, their behaviour shaping what the brand actually makes. That's a fundamentally different value exchange: instead of inviting people into a community, the brand saw that people were already doing something interesting, and built around the community that already existed.
Community strategy goes back to mission
Brands often ask whether they should build a community. Increasingly, that’s the wrong question. People already have communities. What they’re deciding is which brands deserve a place inside them.
Women return to communities because they feel useful, consistent, and connected to who they are or who they want to become. Community doesn’t replace product, marketing, or strategy. It makes people care enough to stay.
For Alo, that mission is bringing yoga to the world: creating spaces where people feel connected through movement, ritual, and shared identity. The product is sportswear. The community is the life built around wearing it.
For Vaseline, the dynamic is different but the principle is the same. People were already using the product in creative ways to remove friction from everyday life. Instead of trying to control that behaviour, the brand followed it — and built from it.
In both cases, growth came from the same place: a clear understanding of what the brand fundamentally offers, combined with genuine curiosity about how people were already using it, shaping it, and building it into their lives.
The brands that grow strongest won’t be the ones shouting the loudest. They’ll be the ones people return to.
