Community : The Fourth Pillar of a Sticky Brand 

We looked at Connection last fortnight, so this week we're on Pillar 4. Community. Which is a pillar most businesses want and talk about at conferences, but hardly any of them actually invest in properly, sound familiar?

The word community gets thrown around a lot in the marketing circles, and I don't think it means very much most of the time. Every time someone launches a WhatsApp group for their customers or starts a paid membership on Discord, they're pretty quick to call it a community. Fair do's. But in our minds , those things are formats. Formats can absolutely become communities over time, but launching a format doesn't necessarily create one off the bat. Community as a marketing pillar is something different, and it's the state you eventually get to when your customers are quietly telling other people about you without being asked, without being paid, and often without even mentioning it back to you.

So what makes community different from the first three pillars, and why does it deserve one pillar on its own? Well, clarity is something you can decide on in a morning over your PSL or flat white. Consistency is a matter of holding your nerve on a rhythm you've already picked, fortune favours the brave and all that. Connection is a set of small choices about how visible your team is, and that's not the same for everyone. However, those three are all things you actively do and actively choose to do, or think about. Community is the thing that starts to happen to you if you do the first three well for long enough.

You can't really build a community directly. You can only build the conditions where it eventually forms. Someone who has been reading your consistent content for eighteen months, who feels they know the actual humans behind your business, and who is clear on what you do and who you do it for, will at some point tell a friend. Not because you asked them to. Because they have quietly decided you belong on a mental list of people they recommend when the subject comes up.

That mental list is community. And it pains me to say it, but that list is worth more than any campaign you'll ever run!

What I see business owners and senior leaders try to do sometimes is skip the first four pillars and jump straight to building a Facebook group or launching a rewards scheme, hoping that'll speed up the community bit. I can tell you now, it doesn't work. If anything it slows them down, because they end up spending time managing an audience that hasn't got a strong enough reason to be there yet! You can spot these groups a mile off. You know the ones we mean? They start with a launch flurry, they have thirty members in the first week, and by month six the same three people are posting into a room that's stopped listening or put it on mute.

The businesses I know that have proper community around them all did more or less the same thing without trying to. They kept turning up in the same places for years, they were generous with their knowledge in ways that probably cost them work they could have charged for, they treated their customers well long before they had to, and they said sorry properly when they got things wrong. None of that looks impressive in the moment, and most of it is common decency. But three or four years in, they've got customers who talk about them at dinner parties, colleagues who bring their name up in meetings they weren't in the room for, and referrals that arrive with no prompting.

The other thing worth noticing about community is that it protects you when things go wrong. Businesses without a community are one bad review away from a wobble. Businesses with a community have people who will step in and defend them without being asked, because they feel invested in the business's story rather than just having transacted with it once. That defensive layer takes years to build and about a fortnight to knock over if you handle a mistake badly, which is why the fourth pillar and how you show up in the difficult moments are pretty much inseparable.

There's a version of this that I love to see, and in the last month have stumbled across two of them. There are businesses out there that have been running for a decade or more and have proper communities wrapped around them that would look like magic to a marketing consultant looking in from the outside. And do you know what I was in a meeting last night and we talked about how wild it is in West Cumbria that people are so generous with their community. It isn't magic. It's ten years of turning up at the same events, sponsoring the same local causes, remembering the same customers, and being a bit more generous than Peter in accounts is happy with.

Word of mouth is the oldest marketing there is, and as much as it pains me to say it, it's still the best one.

Content, which is Pillar 5 and where we're going next fortnight, is what most people think marketing actually is. Community is quietly the one that matters most. It is Pillar 4 because it can't exist without the first three, and it makes everything downstream easier if you genuinely get it right. Communities forgive small missteps, amplify big wins, and pull other customers toward you when nobody in your team is looking. That's the compound interest of doing the other three pillars well.

Next fortnight we'll finish the framework with Pillar 5, Content!