September 3, 2026
‘Community’ might be the only term that’s misused more often online than ‘POV.’ Every eCommerce marketing guide insists D2C brands need to make customers feel they belong; subscriptions, sales, and lasting loyalty will soon follow.
The problem is most brand communities don’t function at all like communities. They’re customer success programs with a clingy streak. And while true ‘community’ really can help brands scale faster, many risk wasting time and budget on a vague cliché that makes most customers roll their eyes.
McKinsey has called community the “big idea” of 2020s marketing; nobody wants to miss out on that. Plus D2C brands are uniquely positioned to build genuine connections with their audience. But exactly how, when, and to what extent you should invest in community building is less clear.
We brought together James Kouhry (CEO of Zendbox and serial founder) and Zoe Tindill (Head of Customer Experience at Zendbox) to debate the role that community plays in scaling a D2C eCommerce business.
This piece is part of a series Zendbox has produced analysing the key dilemmas D2C founders face as they scale.
Community building can seem like the slightly soft cousin of subscription services: more emotional, less cut-throat, and taking a little longer to mature. But the commercial impact can actually be even bigger, Zoe says.
“Subscriptions are a great way to retain customers,” she explains. “But you still have the problem of scaling demand.” Most D2C brands grow linearly: each new customer is roughly as difficult to acquire. When customers start to identify with the brand, they actively share it with people.
Glossier is the canonical example: the brand grew rapidly by building a real community. Products were developed directly based upon customer comments; users shared their routines through branded hashtags. At its peak, nearly 80% of customers were referred by someone they knew.[2]
If you can build a similar sense of shared ownership and identification, it enables exponential growth. Each new customer you win through ads or social media makes the next customer easier to acquire. Maybe they invite a friend to your running club; maybe they tell their mates about something that happened on the Discord server.
Suddenly, D2C brands benefit from network effects usually reserved for platform-based companies that lure you in with the promise of stalking old school mates.
That means lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), meaning is cheaper to win new customers; it also means faster demand generation, as your brand is amplified across a growing network.
And it can help brands fix one of their biggest pain points. “The price premium is often overlooked,” Zoe says. “Plenty of brands plateau and start to see sales drop or slow when they bump up prices. But when you’ve got a loyal community, customers want the brand to succeed.”
One study found that 68% of loyal customers would keep buying even if prices increased. That gives D2C brands more leeway to adapt prices if supply chain costs or fulfilment complexity start to erode margins.
The question is how you generate that level of loyalty, which is exactly where James says most brands struggle. As James explains, most community building relies on finding passionate, well-connected advocates. But it takes time to find them, and in the meantime many will avoid engaging because there aren’t any advocates; the ultimate community building catch-22.
“I call it the ‘empty restaurant’ problem,” he says. “Most people don't want to be the first ones in. You might be advertising your meet-ups or Facebook group for a while before someone brave enough comes along.”
And while D2Cs might have an easier time here—there can be social status to be gained from being an early-adopter—there’s also a problem with trying to force people to become advocates.
The idea of community building is great, James says. But it’s often presented as if there’s some reliable playbook that makes people feel connected with your brand: “It feels like organised fun, like the brand thinks you can’t see it’s trying to engineer a sense of loyalty for its own benefit.”
People tend to recoil from being manipulated like that, or at the very least cringe. “Just think about that Pepsi advert where they solved racism,” James says. “Even an important message like that generates pushback if it seems inauthentic or cynical.”
The so-called ‘playbook’ usually consists of examples of very specific brands doing very specific things. “You can’t just copy Glossier and expect the same results,” James says. “Glossier doesn’t even get the same results now.”
His takeaway is simple: brands that want to build real communities must always pay a price. “It’s not necessarily just a financial investment,” he says. “It could be the time or attention or effort it takes to turn up consistently and really engage with people.” But that cost must be felt by the audience, otherwise they won’t believe the community is truly valued.
“The biggest problem is seeing community building as a marketing trick,” James says. “Community involves give-and-take. You can’t just hire an engagement manager or have Claude write some Facebook posts and expect people to invest real time or emotion into your business.”
Such half-hearted efforts tend to have a net-negative impact on the business. “You give up a certain amount of credibility,” James says. “And even if the effect is fairly small—customers aren’t necessarily invested enough to care—you’ve also wasted time and money that could’ve been spent elsewhere.”
James also pushes back on the idea that community is a silver bullet for scaling demand. Yes, it can generate word-of-mouth, but it also creates potential friction down the road. “A lot of brands build their community around a specific niche,” he says. “What happens if you want to expand your audience down the line?”
Ultimately, he argues that founders should be wary of hype driven by vested interests. Much of the excitement around intentional brand community building comes from social media agencies and people whose jobs rest on community marketing as a valuable pursuit.
A recent CMX Community Industry Report found that 83% of teams believe community is core to their company's mission, while 79% report their community has had a positive impact on their organisation's objectives over the past 12 months. But those numbers come from a survey of people whose job is building brand communities; “imagine if they said ‘yeah, it’s all basically bollocks,’” James says.
Ultimately, the potential value of community building depends on how you approach it.
Community marketing only works when it comes from the audience. Brands can’t just build the kind of community they want; it needs to be built around what matters to your customers.
“That’s a really common problem,” James says. “Brands often want to reflect this fantasy image of their company, rather than raising up their customers.” Most of the ‘cringe’ marketing he sees comes from companies that have an inflated or distorted image of themselves.
“It’s like watching David Brent,” he says. “You really think people want a singles night sponsored by a protein powder?”
D2C brands have a unique advantage over other companies here. The model lends itself to regular, direct feedback that allows you to calibrate your efforts and genuinely involve customers in the development of the community.
Putting up posters for an event or having a digital landing page is fine, but what if you included a handwritten invitation in each order during a specific period? The relatively small added effort would immediately generate dramatically more interest in the event.
That’s where the D2C model really thrives: marketing, customer success, and logistics all work together to help the brand grow. “You can grow a real community faster,” Zoe says. “Because you’re starting from the assumption of direct, immediate engagement.”
But it’s important to remember that community marketing doesn’t have to mean building from scratch. “You don’t need to ‘own’ the community,” Zoe says. “Lots of brands are better off attaching themselves to a pre-existing community, especially in spaces like health and wellness where people often already feel ‘at home.’”
An emerging sports supplement might sponsor local races or give out free products to running clubs. That’s a relatively cheap way to build an association with a sense of belonging people already feel within those environments. It also doesn’t preclude running future events that you own; it can be a great way to build momentum early on.
That raises the question of investment: how should you allocate time and money to community building?
For James, the answer comes down to strategy. “You need to be realistic about the short-term ROI,” he says. “You won’t necessarily even see much financial benefit, but you certainly won’t see it immediately.” Brands need to evaluate how long-term their thinking can afford to be; for many a real ‘ownable community’ is best kept for periods where they have steady orders and a little financial tailwind.
Zoe offers a slightly different take: most D2C brands would benefit from framing all marketing around the concept of community. “It’s not about making everything into ‘community building,’” Zoe says. “It’s about seeing that those foundational pieces—shared identity, direct engagement, serving a real niche—are what makes most D2C marketing effective.”
On this, James concurs: “If you’re building a D2C brand and there’s no sense of community, you’re probably doing something wrong.” And while every business has budget limitations, most of the real work of building a community isn’t about investing in big events or complex outreach: it’s about ensuring every part of your business truly cares about the end customer.
It can, but the mechanism matters. Most D2C growth is linear: every new customer costs roughly what the last one did. Community changes that equation, because customers start recruiting on your behalf.
Acquisition gets cheaper as you grow rather than more expensive. There's a pricing benefit too: brands with genuinely loyal customers have more headroom to raise prices without losing volume, which counts for a lot when fulfilment costs or supply chain complexity start eating into margin.
The catch is that none of this can be engineered or predicted in a budget spreadsheet. Brands that invest in community must be aware it could take months before it generates a return on their investment; it isn’t guaranteed to ever produce tangible gains.
Usually it's the sense that a brand is engineering the community for its own benefit and assuming nobody will notice. Customers are quick to spot the gap between what a company says it cares about and what it actually does; the reaction is either pushback or secondhand embarrassment.
The other common failure is self-image: brands build the community they'd like to be associated with rather than one their customers would want to join. Half-hearted attempts aren't cost-neutral, either. You lose a bit of credibility along with the budget, and the money would almost always have worked harder somewhere else.
Accept that almost nobody wants to be first through the door, then lower the cost of walking in. Direct invitation beats broadcast. A handwritten note in an order asks something of the customer and offers something back; a landing page just sits there waiting.
Start with people who have already shown their hand: repeat buyers, customers who reply to your emails, anyone posting about you without being asked. Better still, don't start from zero at all. Attaching yourself to a community that already exists, whether that's sponsoring a local race or supplying a running club, borrows a sense of belonging instead of trying to manufacture one.
Most of the work isn't expensive, it just requires consistency. Turning up, replying properly, and acting on what customers tell you costs attention rather than money, and attention is what audiences actually read as investment.
Sponsorships and partnerships are a cheap route in if you'd rather not own the space yourself. It also helps to stop treating community as a separate line item. If shared identity and direct engagement already run through your marketing, your customer service and your packaging, you're doing most of the work without funding a programme to do it for you.
.svg){kind=icon}
