Marketing trends come and go and currently community is a theme which is  creating a buzz as it becomes a much-discussed tool to build brand loyalty. Community conjures up lots of positive attributes – engagement, connection, communication among peers, support and more. No wonder nurturing a space for community sounds like a good thing for a brand to do.

But before brands jump on this bandwagon, we need to raise a big red warning flag. Because while there are some brands that successfully build communities – they tend to have very specific ingredients that can combine for success – a blanket assumption that community is the new best thing for brands is an erroneous one.

It comes from flawed logic. It starts with a marketer’s dilemma that loyalty – and loyalty schemes, in particular – are too often predominantly transactional and therefore lacking in emotion. So, the solution must be to inject some emotion, so it’s not purely functional. The next step in this reasoning is that community is the right vehicle to introduce that emotion as it allows brands to create new relevance in people’s lives. There’s nothing wrong with looking for more relevance – but that community is the answer, is a big leap.

Community does address our innate desire for connection and belonging, it has the potential to add new touch points to a loyalty programme by reinforcing relationships with a brand’s customers, and to add an opportunity to farm insight. But before anything, the business needs to ask the first of several crucial questions: does the brand have a right to play here?

What is it about your brand that will make it a conduit to bring people together better than they can do themselves? Authenticity is key. If your brand can’t claim to be absolutely and uniquely qualified to host a community in the most natural of ways, then don’t even think about it.

Communities by their nature are organic, they reflect the outlooks and lives of people connecting within them – but this is quite slippery and uncontrollable and those of us in the business of building brands don’t like slippery, uncontrollable stuff. So, unless you are confident that you have a thread that can run through your community – that is authentic and right for you, and that you can maintain control of – then there’s a risk.

People will not automatically love a brand more because it has set up a community – that is by no means a given, even if the community is embraced. It could be the most thriving and special community ever, but is it going to work for you?

Which brings us to the next argument that is often put forward for creating a community – that it will deliver great insight. In which case, it’s time of another important question: are the people who are going to be most engaged in this community the people you really want to hear from – will it create genuinely usable and representative insight?

A brand will garner some learning, but, rather like trawling Twitter for the public’s opinions, what you see is a very particular slice of the public – the ones who aren’t afraid to engage publicly. Because despite the volumes of people on social media – few step outside their close and guarded circle of friends and family to share their opinions with the entire metaverse. Similarly with communities – the ones speaking and sharing will be a unique subset of a brand’s wider customer base.

So before embarking on a community as an insight tool, remember there are many other – potentially more robust and representative – ways of understanding your customers. Not least more traditional market research such as surveys or website analytics. Most successful brands already have good insight-generating research strategies.

And the final question to ask is does your brand have the resources to maintain a community? Communities are thirsty for content, they need care, they need someone to constantly stoke the conversation to keep it sparking, they need invigilating – and all that takes time, money and resource. If you want people to be engaged, you must give them something worthwhile to engage with. And it must be fresh and relevant – it can’t be recycled.

Digital spaces can be brilliant, but they can also be rough. We can all see from the current context of sharing information and opinions and the quality of conversation on public platforms that much care is needed.

There are good communities out there – Adidas’ Runtastic, Johnson & Johnson’s Babycentre and Sephora’s Beauty Insider community stand out for their relevancy, content and engagement. The important ingredients are that people are passionate about, and naturally want to share and gain others’ experiences from, these products and services. These brands all have an authentic reason to be creating communities for these groups of people.

So before leaping into community, your brand should first focus on making sure it does the basics right. Loyalty is most likely to come from the brand consistently performing well – by just doing things right, solving customers’ problems, delighting people from time to time and occasionally thanking them.