Lessons on building a brand community from Yeti, Peloton, Spotify and more

Rooting a business within a community, passion or hobby can be a really valuable way to grow a brand and ensure its long-term survival. But, it’s often not the quickest root to sales; it takes time and a lot more considered marketing. It also requires a degree of trust to give the community autonomy to organize themselves as ‘members’ of the brand.

Here, we take a look at Yeti’s playbook and the strategies of other brands that have taken a chance on communities.

Yeti

Yeti, the maker of coolers and outdoor gear, initially built its name among the fishing and ranching communities in the US backcountry. Recently, it has entered the cultural zeitgeist and got marketers excited about its community-based strategy.

Dena Walker, chief strategy officer at Above+Beyond, says: “Yeti is the playbook for doing it the way that the textbooks tell you you’re supposed to do it, rather than the way that the industry pushes us all to do it.”

Yeti’s strategy has been to forge ties with communities that have organically embraced its products, such as surfers and skaters, as well as the BBQ community. It then uses those communities to inspire product innovations.

“Everything it does is driven by its customers and where its customers tell it to go,” says Walker. “It then uses those tribes to find the rest of the tribe members and just get deeper and deeper.”

For Walker, Yeti’s success is down to behaving like its customers. “It acts and feels like those communities, even down to sponsorships and partnerships, and rather than doing the big mass sports stuff, it does small and niche competition,” she says. As an example, it takes out endemic print ads in niche magazines as a way to keep them going.

Community-based marketing is a strategy worth exploring, says Walker. “When it comes to passion points and special interests, we’re borderless in the resources of inspiration.”

Rapha

Rapha, the UK-founded cycling apparel brand, has built a strong global community outside of just gear and clothing. The company rarely invests in regular marketing beyond sponsorship, its stores and its exclusive membership program. For £70 a year, a Rapha membership gives access to group rides and events, discounts, the Rapha magazine, a bike rental scheme and coffee shops.

The brand has a lot of partnerships with like-minded companies that share audiences – for example, putting on joint events with the alcohol-free beer Lucky Saint. What is interesting in the Rapha case is that the company lets its community self-organize on its app, with members able to plan rides without any input from Rapha itself.

Rapha’s founder, Simon Mottram, previously said: “The sport is amazing – what they actually do, how they do it, the history, the culture, incredible aesthetic, amazing stories. So there is that huge wellspring of ideas that no one was talking about. I wanted to put together how amazing this sport was. Nobody had applied that to bike clothing; nobody had pulled this together in a way that really reflected how amazing this sport is and brought this to more people. That is why Rapha was born.”

Olio

Originally developed as a mobile app to help people redistribute their unwanted food, Olio has evolved to tackle all household items and waste. The app has 7 million users and has so far facilitated the sharing of over 100m portions of food and 9m household items.

Olio was founded as a sustainable brand that marketed itself on its environmental benefits, but over time, its leadership team started to see the community and social benefits of the app. Keen to lean into this customer insight, Olio shifted its business towards community management.

Its founder, Tessa Clarke, previously told The Drum: “In earlier versions, the motivational hierarchy led with climate, but the more we talked to people, the more we realized that community and climate needed to be flipped. Millions of people are in survival mode right now and that makes it extremely difficult to think about anything so esoteric as saving the world. But if you couch it in personal terms and show people how it’s going to make their lives better, then it becomes the best way to galvanize people to take action.”

Since the shift, Clarke revealed that 40% of users said they have made friends through the app, 66% say sharing has improved their mental health and 75% say sharing has improved their financial wellbeing.

Spotify

On an entirely different scale, Chris Jefford, chief executive and co-founder of the music and culture agency Truant London, puts forward Spotify as a case study in community marketing. “Connecting with (and more often creating) communities has always been a strong component of music culture,” he says. “Music is about creativity, identity and community and the platform was quick to embrace all three, leveraging both the personal and universal side of music to grow.”

Jefford lists activities such as the annual Wrapped campaign, the sharing of tracks and creating collaborative playlists.

“The platform was also quick to open its API to creators to facilitate further engagement from the development community, deepening its roots in music technology and its Spotify Stars program rewards community interaction with exclusive events, sneak peeks of developments and other exclusive rewards, creating a complex, engaged set of community ecosystems that are the envy of the more historical music heavyweights.”

Peloton

Peloton claims its purpose is to “improve the lives of its members,” with the word ’members’ consistent across all of its comms rather than ’users’ or ’customers.’

Peloton was created as a solution for busy adults who wanted the shared experience of a gym class but who didn’t have time to make it to the gym.

The shared experience is a crucial part of Peloton’s USP. Through its membership, people can send high fives, join leaderboards and even video chat with strangers. Peloton also manages a community Facebook page to share tips and advice for working out and healthy eating.

The company often puts the focus on its ‘community’ at the heart of its marketing, especially when it has suffered a PR crisis or its business is struggling. For example, in its ‘It’s You. That Makes Us’ 30-second ad, Peloton put the spotlight on how its community of 5.4 million riders has organically formed to support one another.