Our Frontier: Community

At the frontier of JDI’s own practice is designing experiences and building community.

These are things that we started offering to clients more than a decade ago but that remained semi-secretly “off the menu” until now. We are putting our work designing and building community increasingly front-and-center of what we do at the firm.

From helping to co-found Culturati, which is still flourishing in its 10th year, to our newest project Penrose, JDI has accumulated a great deal of field experience.

Along the way, we’ve honed a differentiated set of frameworks and methods for experience and community-making that we are excited to start sharing more widely.

Here are a few things we know for sure so far.

Community grows best relationship by relationship, from the bottom up. The most successful community-building campaigns today are an expression of shared experience.

When it comes to community-building, little experiences matter as much, if not more, than extravagant ones. For example, a handwritten letter sent the old-fashioned way almost always has an outsized effect. Effort and patience never go out of style; and they are, we’d argue, more powerful today than ever.

Community can happen with and amongst just about anyone — customers, prospects, partners, employees, investors, members, key stakeholders, fans. We seldom meet an organization that wouldn’t greatly benefit from a stronger community somewhere.

Designing experiences and building community doesn’t have to mean hosting an ambitious gathering, though it certainly can. Community happens both online and off.

Community is one of the things that we humans are uniquely able to create and participate in, and that makes it special. Experiences enliven us and remind us who we are. No AI is necessary in the slightest.

Community is really hard to fake, and even harder to force. That’s a good thing. Also: a bunch of people in a room with drinks and passed appetizers does not community make.

Community is often catalyzed by creating “safe emergency” experiences for an individual or group — i.e. non-threatening situations in which usual depth and commitment are nonetheless required. This can happen with something as simple as the right dinner table question, a special favor, or an urgent request for the most precious thing of all: time.

Most of all, community is deeply personal, and that’s rarified air for any brand given how profoundly private our innermost selves have become. But our experience of it has to be authentic for any of this to work, and that’s easier said than done.

Strong communities come in every shape and size. They all ask something of us, though. Personal doesn’t mean personalized; it means sacrifice. Many of the best experiences of our lives require calculated personal risk.

Today, the work of designing and building community is ultra-relevant to our clients for a confluence of these reasons, and more. Keep reading to learn more about the why and how of this emerging practice.

Our Lonely World

Marketing in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world is not easy.

In the U.S., we are extraordinarily lonely as a culture and population. You’ve heard and read about this phenomenon plenty already.

We don’t know our neighbors particularly well. Traditional community centers like churches have largely abdicated their role (or been justifiably fired from it). We’re not regulars at as many restaurants, if at all.

We live in a heartbreakingly polarized civil context, and many of our relationships are in need of repair they’re unlikely to get anytime soon.

Many of us also live in a state of vigilance or hypervigilance: someone always wants something from us, whether that’s a person, group, or an algorithm. Often we understandably retreat to a small and safe inner circle.

Our attention is also scattered among a half-dozen feeds. Our experience of the world is chaotic and being overwhelmed is too common.

AI, despite its many superpowers, increasingly disintermediates us from experiencing human interaction. We live in a more and more transactional world in endless pursuit of efficiency. Many of us work from home, and those who don’t still spend huge amounts of our day on Zoom.

These factors all create an increasing need for soulful experiences and real community, at the same time as both are getting harder and harder to find.

A Changing Landscape

Marketers aren’t just challenged by shifting realities about identity, culture, and psychology. The very nature of the channels we have depended on for so long is changing just as fast, if not faster.

Search traffic (both organic and paid) has fallen off a cliff in favor of LLM-produced answer summaries that are more unreliable than most users realize.

Read: LLMs “face a complete accuracy collapse” when confronted with complex problems.

The good news: we can still influence AI fairly well with canonical reference pages on sites like Wikipedia, text-heavy user-generated content on platforms like Reddit, and via PR, whose rank atop the marketing stack we’d argue has never been stronger.

Email is overrun with spam, especially if you have disposable income or corporate budget to allocate. AI-driven sales software has created an infinite legion of SDRs (e.g. salespeople focused on cold outbound prospecting).

SMS is no longer the safe haven it once was; the average person’s text message volume has gone up 7,700% in the last decade, according to Ad Age. WhatsApp, Signal, et al. show a similar noise increase.

The algorithms that govern social platforms have a profound recency bias, and a reinforcing effect overall; they do not introduce us to new ideas or products outside of what they think we already want. Brands can still win big on social media, but even the most sophisticated practitioners we know are quick to complain about an increasingly black box.

The effectiveness of advertising rates has fallen by half since 2020 according to Marketing Week.

Worst of all, the combination of all this might be making us dumber. Our modern condition pours gasoline on an already dangerous relationship to devices for both children and adults, as Jonathan Haidt and others have repeatedly warned. That’s not good for folks like us who seek to disrupt the status quo.

Read: MIT finds that Chat GPT usage erodes critical thinking skills.

This all amounts to, shall we say, a complex environment in which to successfully market. Certainly the common experience of being marketed to today is quite poor. How do we break through in 2025 and beyond?

Our Hypothesis

Our hypothesis is that experiences are increasingly valuable, and that special and analog experiences have superpowers.

A closely related idea: the opposite of hyper-efficient automation is deliberate inefficiency and overflowing generosity.

Most importantly, we believe that being and belonging together in community is a value proposition most brands can leverage to sustainably fuel growth.

To the point above about handwritten letters, we’ve recently been making the argument that, based on what we’re seeing at JDI, the physical mailbox is one of the most interesting and effective marketing channels today. This is especially true as most organizations wisely trade hockey-stick growth for more intimate and sustainable lead acquisition pathways and long-term, loyal customer relationships.

Fun fact: physical letter-writing is back on a growth curve after a decade in decline, according to new research done by the New York Public Library.

All of us went perhaps a little overboard on the e-commerce front during the peak COVID years, didn’t we? But checking the mail remains a joyful activity for most. We’re not imagining Bed, Bath & Beyond flyers though — differentiation remains an overriding priority regardless of the medium or method.

As for being IRL, the bandwidth of the pipe when we’re in person together is substantial, and logging off in many ways has become a luxury. The bar is much higher offline, and so are expectations. That’s a really good thing if you can manage to meet or exceed them and build a convener brand in the process.

What’s trending up these days? Instructively, everything from WNBA attendance and run clubs to gym memberships, conference-going, museum memberships, and book clubs.

So too are supper clubs, private clubs, pickleball and padel, pet fostering, puzzling and board games, and much more. Connection-seeking is more deliberate these days, but more intense as well. We’re trying however we can.

Some other fun facts: physical books sales, which had been declining for more than a decade, started growing again in 2021, and that percentage has increased YoY every period since. The number of physical bookstores are also showing high growth rates again, for the first time in a decade and a half. Vinyl record sales are stronger than they’ve been in decades.

What this all means for us is not that we ought to eschew digital marketing, but rather that there’s enormous and increasing opportunity offline and in real-life — especially for anything pioneering a new category or seeking to upend an existing paradigm.

Central to making this all work in service of measurable ROI is spurring word of mouth behaviors. Customers creating other customers is the best business case for community; increasing retention and LTV rank a close second.

To do that, in turn, we have to create and do remarkable things — things literally worthy of remark. We have to deserve being talked about, with activities that create true belonging, and experiences that we want our friends to experience alongside us. Some parts of life are fundamentally better together. What are those for you and yours?

Creating Real Community

Every community has unique reasons for being together, and their various traditions, gatherings and culture correspondingly so. Still, we think that when a real community is being built, a few things are almost always present.

Here’s what the recipe includes from JDI’s point-of-view.

Safe Space.

In a hyper-public world, confidentiality and being off-the-record is gold. Psychological safety helps make deepening relationships possible. Honesty and vulnerability happen fast if the conditions are right. This is true in both small and large groups alike, and both online and off.

Private digital communities for instance, are going to keep growing at breakneck pace. This all doesn’t mean you have to always keep things on the DL, though. You shouldn’t. But you absolutely do need to deliberately create certain spaces and opportunities that have this characteristic.

If you’re a marketer, it’s worth exploring: where in my customer journey or funnel are there respites and safe places? Where does my brand show up and interact where things are not being recorded, surveiled, or somehow mediated? Such experiences are highly desirable precisely because of the knowing-unknowing polarity it creates.

After all, what is sex appeal other than showing some but not all? IYKTYK is a powerful value proposition too. Every time we Accept Cookies, something psychologically shifts for the worse.

At JDI we also like the term sacred space. The secular meaning of sacred is: “worthy of reverence and respect.”

Healthy communities and circles of trust can quickly turn safe spaces into sacred ones. Attendees of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual gathering often refer to it as sacred. We’ve heard similar language from Burners, White House OSTP alumni, middle school robotics teams, Kauffman Fellows, Costco customers, Patagonia employees, Vocaré members, and many more.

In Common.

True peers with something special in common make community-building easy.

A peer is someone in whom you can see yourself. Peers challenge us, but they also comfort us. They instantly make us feel less alone.

The most deft celebrities and their managers know this — their lives and image may engender aspiration, but they’re also very careful to stay relatable. Peerlessness in contrast is a huge turnoff in today’s context.

Even the lightest casual networking opportunity will produce intimacy and trust if the curation of peers is well-executed. Peers don’t have to be the same age, income, or anything else, by the way. All the better in fact if they aren’t.

But it’s super important that they still share something unique in common beyond just your brand — a belief or value, a habit, a fear, a capacity or certain gifting, a problem felt, a stubborn emotion, or a big burning question.

Also, in a community that’s really got it going on, there shouldn’t be discernible tiers of participants. Everyone should all be seen and heard equally. Cults have levels and inner circles. Communities do not.

Note: you really don’t want to be a cult brand these days — that’s not cool anymore (and maybe it never was). Cult brands are predicated on exclusion.

Instead, a peer brand’s inclusion criteria define it — based on what’s held or pursued or contemplated in common.

(Think: radical acceptance. Overt exclusion and pseudo-inclusion miss the mark.)

True Diversity.

This can be really hard to attain, but it is essential — not for looks, but because diversity is where good ideas and memorable conversations truly come from.

That means diversity of: industry, age, gender, race, origin, experience, thought, and more. As much as we want peers who have qualities in common with us, we also want people around us who can share different perspectives that we’d never have come to on our own.

Closely related, the strongest communities have a distinct culture. They do things and say things and gather in ways that no one else does. Think: social norms, rituals, traditions, and lorecraft. Their diversity is both internal and external in this sense.

Like us, you probably have memories of one Marriott or Hyatt ballroom after another bleeding together indistinguishably. You should never be able to mistake one group for another, or forget which is which.

Overflowing Generosity.

We used this term above; we live and breathe it in everything we design and execute for clients. Hospitality is an overriding priority, whether it’s physical or digital. The possibility that folks might receive more than they give is so surprising that it often moves them in ways that are impossible to anticipate.

Our brilliant friend, the Scottish psychologist Jim McNeish, often talks of “guardianship” — the idea of groups large and small taking care of and responsibility for each other. There’s nothing more generous you can do today than watch someone's back. In many contexts, however, generosity is contingent, and at best a defined reward for a certain behavior(s). Flip that on its head if you want to build real community.

Reward folks for being themselves, and community-creating behavior will quickly follow. Are you being sufficiently generous with your customers? Your partners? The most important people in your world?

Give first, without a specific calculus of benefit. A community in formation will notice and reward you with trust. Trust underwrites risk, and risk powers reward. In this way, strong communities develop their own economies, which only further strengthens the bond.

Humor and Levity.

Humor and levity should be present by design because of what they uniquely add to the mix. Unlike anything else, they disarm us. They are glue. This holds true in even the most serious communities we’ve come across (if not even more so).

Specifically, lighter moments and belly laughter signal that we’ve grown sufficiently comfortable with each other to take calculated risks. If we ever had to manually sort real communities from fake ones, the first thing we’d look for is beloved irreverence.

Also, it’s too damn hard out there otherwise. Humor and levity can be the ultimate gift, and a sneaky good brand differentiator too.

Did this resonate?

If so, you probably either have a community in place already or might consider building one. Maybe you’re just stuck on what to do and what works in 2025 and beyond.

We’d love to learn more. We can start small or go big, and everything in between.

Specifically, JDI can:

Design a new community initiative from scratch: type, mode, and members; rituals and social objects; communication and content
Define and implement how your brand shows up in community and how the business benefits in excess of the resources you invest
Help revitalize an experience or community that’s been around for awhile and reawaken its purpose
Serve as a fractional community manager, moderator, MC and more
Serve as facilitator for a workshop or workshop series
Create a dinner series focused on key influencers and stakeholders in your category
Devise and implement new appreciation and inclusion-focused strategies to ensure that everyone in your community is welcomed, heard, introduced to others, and celebrated for their contributions
Tie into customer acquisition or retention programs by enriching current value propositions and brand equity with special experiences that stop customers and partners dead in their tracks
Conceptualize and execute customer or partner summits of all kinds
Program editorial events (topics, speakers, panels, firesides) with highly differentiated elements that stand out from the norm
Plan field trips and other shoulder-to-shoulder or “parallel play” opportunities for any group(s) that naturally form bonds most effectively through hands-on activity
Develop unique experiences to increase intimacy and appreciation with executive teams, internal teams, and Boards (Advisors, Directors)
Build enduring community around a media-based audience like a book or podcast
Help differentiate a major proposal, strategic plan, or RFP response with experiential or community-based elements that give target(s) a taste of what it would feel like to actually work together
Galvanize a product-based community to take a bigger role with greater ownership ownership (reviews, feedback, evangelism)
Imagine a new word-of-mouth campaign or system to encourage customer to create other customers using experience design and community-building as a lens

Thank you for reading! We’re glad to be on this journey with all of you.

If any of this resonates, let’s talk more about it soon:
hello@jones-dilworth.com