Five years ago, community was the shiny new idea every brand wanted a piece of, filed alongside personalization, omni-channel, and experience as the capability leaders raced to master. Today it is no longer new. It is everywhere. And this ubiquity has become its own problem. When every brand claims to have a community, the word starts to mean very little.
The human need underneath community, though, has only deepened. In 2025, the World Health Organization recognized social connection as a pillar of health, reporting that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness and that weak social connection is linked to roughly 871,000 deaths a year. People are not short on brands talking at them — they are short on real connection. Our own Jackman Human Insights Study found the same thing from another angle: 43% of consumers named connection, in words like unite, friendship, and gathering, as the core thing they are looking for when they engage with others.
So, the appetite for community is real, and so is the prize. Yet most brands are still getting it wrong. In this article, we’ll explore the reasons why some brands are still failing, and what the ones that are getting it right understand.
Trust didn’t fall. It’s evolved.
The deepest reason why community is challenging is one most brands haven’t fully absorbed: what has happened to trust. It’s not that people have stopped trusting, it’s that they’ve redirected it away from institutions and towards the people closest to them. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer captures the shift cleanly: when people reflect on the major events of the past five years, they report losing trust in national government leaders, big news organizations, and large companies, while gaining trust in their neighbors, families, friends, and coworkers. Authority lost and the local circle won.
On top of this shift, seven-in-ten people now hold what has been defined as an insular trust mindset, meaning that they are hesitant or unwilling to trust anyone who doesn’t share their values, beliefs, or way of seeing the world. In other words, trust has become conditional on belonging. For a brand, that raises the bar. Brands can no longer earn a place in someone’s circle by simply being seen or present. It’s earned by clearly and recognizably being for people like them.
This is the world AI now sits on top of. When someone asks an assistant what to buy or who to trust, the answer leans on what real people have said, not on what brands say about themselves. Reddit has quietly become one of the most-cited sources across AI search, precisely because it carries unfiltered, peer-to-peer opinion. The conversation about your brand is already happening, in rooms you don’t own and can’t control, and people trust those rooms far more than they trust you. AI is then amplifying those voices to the masses.
Which brings us to the shift every leader needs to sit with: your brand is no longer yours. Jeff Bezos once defined a brand as what people say about you when you’re not in the room. The only questions that matter now are who is in that room, and whether you’ve given them something worth repeating.
The Passionate 10%: the people who actually own your brand.
Who are the people in that room? The answer is not everyone, and not equally. When we set out to quantify community, we found that engagement is wildly lopsided. About 10% of consumers — who we coined as the Passionate 10% — are deeply, actively passionate, and ultimately shape what everyone else believes. They are the creators and facilitators of community, the real owners of your brand. Their word does more to define who you are than any campaign or any amount of paid media.
Co-ownership in this manner means that there is a motivated group already willing to speak for you, defend you, and pull others in, as long as you treat them as partners to co-build with rather than an audience to broadcast at. Brands are starting to notice this and put it to work. Influencer relationships are shifting away from one-off paid placements toward longer partnerships built on genuine affinity — and, increasingly, toward co-creation, inviting their most passionate members to help shape products, content, and events rather than simply endorse them. Consumers can tell the difference between conviction and a contract, and between being marketed to and being built with.
The two mistakes that sink most brand communities.
Once you accept that it’s really the Passionate 10% who own your brand, two familiar mistakes come into focus, both of which arise from the same impulse: trying to manufacture what can only be earned.
The first mistake is that a loyalty program is a community. Many brands assume that engagement can be built upon member-only perks, exclusive content, and insider status. Consumers tell us the reverse. When we asked what matters most when they engage with others around something they care about, getting product information (9%) and becoming an exclusive insider (5%) sat at the very bottom. What rose to the top was learning something new (47%), expressing themselves freely (42%), and sharing what they know (41%). Exclusivity and one-way messaging don’t build community. Reciprocity and real exchange do.
The second is that if you build it, they will come. They won’t. People have finite time and attention. Most belong to only three or four communities, and those are largely claimed by family, work, friends, and/or faith. That leaves little room for one organized around a brand, which is why a large majority of branded online communities fail inside their first year. The brands that win usually don’t build from scratch. Instead, they find where their customers already gather and earn a role there. Bandit, the performance running label, is a clean example of this: they built their retail around the run club rather than the other way around, with lockers for group runs, a café, and early opening hours for runners. The community formed first, and then the commerce followed.
The prize, when you get it right.
When done well, community compounds into realized commercial value. Lululemon, built on in-store classes and a grassroots ambassador program, crossed $10.6 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, topping $10 billion for the first time. Glossier grew largely on customer advocacy, with the bulk of its early traffic and sales coming through peer referral. Ralph Lauren extended its world through Ralph’s Coffee, turning a lifestyle into a place people want to belong to rather than just shop from. Different categories, different mechanics, one common thread: community members have bought into a shared belief—whether it was freedom, in-the-know status, or the “sweatlife”—long before they bought a product.
The work of the work.
The shared belief which binds Lululemon’s, Glossier’s, and Ralph Lauren’s members together did not just appear on its own; it came from the brands knowing exactly who they are. Many leaders reach for a community program in absence of a clear brand narrative, and that is the wrong instinct. If the people forming community around you are going to get your story right, the story must be clear in the first place. Building this strategic clarity often comes down to three questions that leadership teams should be able to answer in plain language and be totally aligned on:
- Who are we for? The specific customer you are designing for, whose values you genuinely share. This is also where your Passionate 10% lives.
- Why us, and not the others? The value you offer that competitors don’t, said the way a customer would say it, not the way a strategy deck would.
- How should we show up? The way the brand looks, sounds, and behaves, consistently enough that people recognize it without the logo.
When these three strategies are sharp and executives are on the same page, the community that forms around you tends to get you right, because there is a clear signal to follow. When they are fuzzy, the gap fills with someone else’s version of you.
The bottom line
The brands that win the next decade of community won’t be the ones with the slickest platform or the biggest follower count. They’ll be the ones secure enough to admit their brand is shifting ownership, are clear enough about who they are and who they want to be, and are willing to co-build with the people who are going to write their story anyway.
