August 24, 2026
Brand communities have been called “the big idea” of 2020s marketing, but most coverage focuses on vague promises about customer loyalty and ROI. This article brings together two experts with hands-on experience to answer D2C founders’ questions about the practical side of community building.
Ask a D2C founder at random and you’ll either hear that ‘community building’ is the only true path to sustainable scale, or that it’s a passing fad that mostly leads to sparsely attended events and dormant Discord servers.
In reality, both are correct; communities can make your brand go supernova or turn out to be a catastrophic waste of time. The question is not whether community is a good investment, but what kind of strategy and execution you’re capable of.
So we brought together James Kouhry (CEO of Zendbox and serial founder) and Alice Pickford (Customer Experience Manager at Zendbox) to explore some of the knottiest challenges leaders face when starting, scaling, and potentially folding a brand community.
Most D2C founders know that community is a powerful driver, but they’re also wary of wasting their time and effort. Not every brand naturally lends itself to community building, and the worst thing you can do is try to engineer a community that would never exist organically.
James says there are two kinds of brand communities: those that form around the product and those where the product helps customers connect with each other. “If you have a really unique product that people get excited about, you could build a community through that enthusiasm,” he says. “But most products aren’t themselves enough to inspire that sort of cult-like following.”
Instead, most brand communities end up attaching to a larger concept or pursuit. Alice offers the example of sportswear companies that often build a strong following that centres on a particular sport or lifestyle. “Your product is a small part of the whole thing, but wearing your clothes or using your pre-workout drinks becomes part of the habit.”
This gives brands licence to build a community that isn’t directly tied to their product. It could mean in-person sports events; it could mean a Discord server where people share advice or arrange games. The commercial impact is not as direct, but if it takes off you end up with thousands of people who are engaging with your brand regularly. That can’t help but build a positive association and generate loyalty.
Alice adds that not every brand community is a real interactive group: plenty of brands simply create a sense of being part of something, like a club, which gives customers the feeling of community. “Craft Gin Club isn’t really a ‘community’ in any normal sense,” she says. “You get the products sent to your house and consume them with your friends and family. So it’s less about the brand building a community, and more about the brand integrating itself into existing connections and habits.”
Here James adds an important point: most brands could theoretically build a community, but the market is often already taken. “An electrolyte drink could easily build a thriving community around running,” he says. “There are just so many of those already. So you’d need some new take on it to attract people in 2026.”
The question is whether your brand can either find unclaimed territory or build momentum through strong execution. “You need either creativity or extreme competence,” James says. “Though obviously, having both is ideal.”
Duolingo is a great example of creativity, according to James. While they experimented with local language learning groups in the past, the brand’s real ‘community’ comes from sharing. “People love telling you about their streaks,” he says. “That simple little mechanism gets people talking about the product, creates an incentive to keep going, and makes you feel like you’re part of a group.”
For great execution, Alice says Sephora is hard to beat. The premise is pretty simple: it’s really just a forum where people share advice on dealing with skin conditions or finding the right products for a particular look. “It’s a community with millions of people,” she says. “Yet because people can find others with the same aesthetic taste or skincare issues, it still feels intimate.”
Community strategy is fun and exciting; it’s easy to get carried away with the idea that your product is going to start a revolution or bring people together. But what happens when you succeed in uniting the world behind your protein snacks?
Community only functions when it is somewhat centralised, otherwise it’s just a load of scattered individuals. There are tons of ways to do this, from self-hosted forums and in-person events to running your own subreddit or Slack channel.
“You don’t need to get it right the first time,” James says. “You can iterate and test like you do with other areas of marketing. Use free platforms initially, then you can add more sophisticated ones that require subscriptions when the community is big enough to warrant it.”
There’s also no pressure to create a single community centre, Alice says. Plenty of brands use a kind of ‘omnichannel’ community management style, where you might have a Discord server along with a Facebook Group, a newsletter, and in-person events.
This table shows just how many options there are and identifies their potential benefits:
Platform typeExamplesProsConsOwned community platformsCircle, Mighty Networks, Skool, Bettermode
You own the member data
If public, content can be indexed by Google and cited by AI answer engines
No algorithm sitting between you and members
Connects to CRM and commerce stack
Charges businesses membership fees, generally at least £50 per month
Empty at launch until you seed it
You generate all the discovery yourself
Price rises and ownership changes are common in this category
Self-hosted forumDiscourse, Flarum
Fully portable, no lock-in
Best search visibility of any option
No per-member cost as you grow
Becomes a long-term content asset
Needs technical setup and hosting
Slowest to feel busy
Reads as dated to some audiences
Chat-firstDiscord, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram
Free or low cost
Live in a day
High daily activity
Suits drops, launches and real-time talk
Notification fatigue pushes people to mute
Constant moderation
Limited control over the interface
Member data can’t be exported
Social network groupsFacebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups
Members are already there
Nothing to build or pay for
Familiar interface, low friction to join
You own none of it
Reach keeps falling
The platform can change or close the format. X retired Communities in May 2026
No way to tie activity to revenue
RedditYour own subreddit, or taking part in existing ones
The most cited source in AI answers
Strong search presence
Unfiltered feedback you will not get elsewhere
You cannot moderate subreddits you didn’t create
Volunteer mods act independently of you
Promotion gets removed or punished
Loyalty and commerce-integratedYotpo, LoyaltyLion, Smile.io, TYB
Sits on top of purchase data
Easiest option to attribute to revenue
Already part of most Shopify stacks
Transactional rather than social
Points are not belonging
Members rarely talk to each other
Email and SMSNewsletter, Substack, beehiiv, SMS lists
You own the list outright
Reaches everyone, no algorithm
Cheap to run
Easy to measure
Members never meet each other
Easy to mistake an audience for a community
In-person and hybridRun clubs, local chapters, ambassadors, events
Deepest loyalty per member
Very hard for competitors to copy
Produces content and word of mouth
High cost per head
Does not scale cheaply
Depends on local organisers
Logistics, insurance, staff time
That might be overwhelming for founders, but it’s important to remember that the ‘best’ channel is whichever one takes off. “No brand with 500k members in its Facebook group spends time wishing it had used Discord, even if that would give them more features,” James says.
The broad commercial logic of community building is straightforward: customer acquisition costs have reached record highs in recent years, and community has been claimed to improve retention and thus drive up overall marketing ROI. Even if it remains hard to win new customers, their lifetime value (CLV) is much higher if they join a thriving community.
Yet the actual economics are not so clear cut, which makes budgeting a difficult balancing act. “There aren’t a ton of reliable metrics that will give you peace of mind,” James says. “So any brand with limited runway or aggressive short-term growth goals will probably be better served by standard performance marketing.”
As a rule of thumb, Alice and James agree brands should start with a very limited budget for community building and ramp it up as the programme takes off. This typically means slowly introducing more advanced platforms, hiring, and potentially running events or even advertising as things take off. But they are sceptical of prescribing any hard-and-fast budgeting rules.
“Most benchmarks or guides you’ll find online are published by companies selling some form of community-building product or service,” Alice points out. “The reality is some brand communities cost almost nothing, because they grow organically, and others are very expensive and take a long time to generate returns.”
Both Alice and James therefore encourage leaders to treat budgeting as a part of the strategic process. “If you set aside a certain amount, then decide what to do with it, you end up spending all of it,” James says. “Whereas you can actually allocate a budget as you go, based on the quality of ideas.”
This creates room for more creative strategies. “Budget allocation often kills innovation,” Alice says. “You don’t need to figure out how to manage the Facebook group more efficiently, because now you can just pay a freelancer to do it for you.”
That doesn’t mean such costs aren’t often necessary; James says founders in particular often find outsourcing or hiring is worthwhile purely for the time it saves, let alone its potential ROI. “It’s really about whether you can afford to pay several months’ salary without any expected returns.”
Just as founders often feel their brand values slipping as operations expand, communities often become fractured or lose their identity when they gain momentum. “The early phase often thrives on a sense of intimacy and ownership,” Alice says. “Everyone feels more invested because it’s this special, secret thing. Then the brand grows and new people kind of dilute that feeling.”
That’s not inevitable, of course. “You have an opportunity to strengthen the community ties,” James says. “Once you have enough people showing interest, you can organise in-person events in larger cities. That’s often much harder when you have a few hundred or even a few thousand people spread across the country.”
The challenge is retaining the sense of real community while you expand. That often comes down to avoiding common pitfalls.
“You need to make sure the growth feels organic,” Alice says. “Nothing switches people off faster than a sense that the community is artificial or just a marketing exercise.”
Another risk to be wary of is pre-emptive stratification or monetisation. “You need to make sure your customers don’t feel you’re capitalising on their loyalty or engagement,” James says. “Adding membership fees or creating a tier system too soon often leads people to lose interest.”
“It’s easy to think ‘our Discord has five thousand members, what could go wrong?’” Alice adds. “But it’s so easy for people to abandon these things, which means you need to be careful about changing things too quickly.”
So how do leaders avoid these problems?
James argues much of it comes back to the groundwork you’ve laid. “If you’ve built the foundations on a shared purpose or set of values, it’s easier to retain,” he says. “The brands I’ve seen struggle are typically ones whose community was built around the product, rather than something larger.”
Another factor is integration: helping newer members feel at home. “Plenty of communities invite people to introduce themselves on their platform,” Alice says. Others expand into more sub-communities and different types of events to cater for a wider range of people.
“Not everyone’s going to attend a running club or party, so you need Zoom events and things like that,” James says. “You can experiment here, because you’ve got leeway. Once the community is big enough, one failed book group isn’t going to tank the whole thing.”
Finally, Alice suggests offering members the opportunity to organise and take control. That could be becoming a platform admin or a subreddit moderator; it could mean volunteering to manage in-person meet-ups or even run sponsored events under the brand name.
“That will give your members a real sense of ownership and autonomy,” she says. “It obviously involves a certain risk; people could take the community in the wrong direction. But it also helps the community remain authentic, even as it grows.”
A strong community often enables brands to grow well beyond their expectations, with word-of-mouth and network effects letting them reach far beyond the normal remit of advertising. But that also creates real risks. Because if your community takes a wrong turn, the association is hard to break.
Peloton’s billion-dollar valuation was largely driven by its exceptional community building; when that same community became a hotbed for conspiracy theories, the brand had to work hard to purge its members to avoid serious backlash. So leaders need to intervene and course-correct if the culture of their communities ever starts to sour.
“It’s not just about the worst case scenario,” Alice says. “You also need to be very proactive about managing how people treat each other and how your chats, forums, and events feel.” She suggests leaders focus on promoting positive values, rather than negative ones.
“Marketers know how powerful a common enemy can be,” she says. “But you should never build a community around negativity. That’s just a recipe for exclusion and can easily turn toxic.”
This can be a delicate balancing act, James says. “You do want your community to feel special,” he explains. “So ensuring it also feels inclusive can be tricky. What you really need is for members of your community to feel that upholding the shared values helps them gain status.”
Alice suggests leaders and community managers pay careful attention to influence within the community. “If you can identify people who are charismatic or hold sway, it becomes much easier to avoid a toxic culture,” she says. “You notice that when brands like Peloton go down the wrong road, it’s often led by a small group of specific people who sort of spread the culture.”
If things do go south, James suggests fast, decisive action is your best bet. “You really need to signal to other members that certain behaviours won’t be tolerated,” he says. “That can be uncomfortable, but it’s vital to protect your brand.”
For Alice, this captures the essential point about all community building. “You really can’t fully control how it grows, how fast, or in what direction,” she says. “What you can do is be diligent about how you respond and how you maintain the vision and values you set out at the start.”
For both Alice and James, that’s really what makes brand communities successful: the right combination of unwavering belief and practical flexibility. And that’s often the exact set of traits that defines D2C founders.
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