World Leading US Brand Expert | Why We've Got 'Brand Community' All Wrong

0:00Sara Wilson:Everyone loves this, but it's that I think that's where brands start and stop at that transactional layer. And let's think about this in terms of relationships. If you were going on a date and you were falling in love with somebody, is it really going to be about I want to get you a gift? I want to get you a gift. And that gift is a coupon. No, babe, you want to get them something that reflects a part of who they are because you've gotten to know them so well and you know what makes them tick. And this is a gift that reflects a core part of their identity. How much more would that be better received?

0:39My next guest taught me on this episode that I'd been thinking about community and social media all wrong. I'm not actually joking. And if you're a founder out there building a consumer brand, I think you'll probably find that you've been thinking about it all wrong too. And that is a bit scary, but hang on, because most of us still believe that our job is to post great content, grow our followers and drive engagement on all of those public platforms that we use like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. But what if the real conversations that matter are happening behind closed doors that you can't actually access?

1:16They're happening in DMs, in WhatsApps in niche communities like Reddit or, you know, Substack. What if that's where people's minds are being changed? What if that's where the influence is happening? Well, my guest today is a digital strategist. Her name is Sarah Wilson, and she is the person who coined the term digital campfires in a landmark Harvard Business Review article. She works with brands like Nike and Netflix and YouTube and Airstream and Yahoo, and she helps them rethink how they show up in communities online. And she believes that the brands winning today are not the ones who are broadcasting the loudest.

1:56No, they are the ones who are learning how to embed themselves meaningfully inside communities that already exist. So in this episode, we're going to explore why relevance and identity and belonging matter so much more than reach and what founders need to do differently if they want their brand to travel through culture rather than just through media spend. So let's dive in.

2:26Sarah Wilson, digital strategist who coined the term digital campfire in Harvard Business Review. Welcome to Brand Growth Heroes. I'm so happy to be here, Fiona.

2:38Sara Wilson:I'm so excited for this show. All the way from very, very sunny LA, right? That's right. God, you're so lucky. And I'm here in very, very dark and cold Isle of Man. I know, it looks very dark there. Like, we're just going to ignore that. It's nighttime. I'm usually, I'm usually like putting the kids to bed by now. Yeah. That's okay. That's okay. It's so good to see you. And thank you so much for coming on the show. So we met through a very close friend of ours who's also been on the show, Mark Mulhern, back in series, I think two or three. Yeah. Masterclass on brand marketing. Mark said, I absolutely had to get into a discussion with you because the way he put it was, a lot of brands are still thinking about marketing in a very old-fashioned way and that you have this incredible view of how we need to think about consumers, community engagement and everything that comes after that.

3:27So I thought, I've got to meet you. And then I was blown away on our call and I've invited you here today to share how you are bringing companies like Netflix and Airstream and Yahoo and who else? Oh, goodness.

3:40Sara Wilson:YouTube, PopSockets, Prince Street Pizza, lots of different big and medium-sized brands across the consumer landscape. Yeah.

3:55Welcome to Brand Growth Heroes, the leading podcast for the founders of Challenger Grocery brands. I'm your host, Fiona Fitz. My 25 years at global giants such as Nestle and Challenger brands such as Goo Chocolate Puds, Chobani and Strong Roots, as well as coached to over 400 scaling brands, means I have the experience to ask the questions that truly matter and get you the insight that will inspire you to think differently and drive serious growth for your brand.

4:27you're shifting mindsets across the U.S. about how to think about community and community engagement and what that really means because I think it's kind of become old-fashioned and stayed where I sit in the industry I sit so sock it to us yes absolutely well first off thank you so much

4:45Sara Wilson:for having me I absolutely love this podcast I went down a rabbit hole of listening and got inspired. So I'm very excited. My whole background, I need to tell you a little bit about it because I think it informs where I am in my thinking. So I started my career in magazines. I started my career coming up in media. And it's interesting because I saw this evolution of brand marketing, marketing, moving towards a more media driven approach, meaning I saw brands becoming, needing to become media companies. I started my career in traditional magazines. I moved to digital media. So I was at Huffington Post for a number of years in that kind of height of the digital media moment.

5:24Sara Wilson:And then I moved to Instagram, Facebook, where I ran lifestyle partnerships across Instagram and Facebook. And we can get into how that inspired a little bit later. But the reason I say that is because I kind of saw this evolution happen in real time, where brands were becoming media companies were becoming media companies were becoming brands, everything was kind of smushing together. And in the same way that you kind of see everything together in your feed, brands had to show up in the same way that media companies were. And so I thought, gosh, you know, I have this expertise having come up through the media of being able to teach brands how to really think like media companies.

6:02Sara Wilson:So that's the original impetus for what I'm doing now when I left Instagram, Facebook in 2018, actually. And I've been solo ever since thinking about what does this new brand landscape look like? I came to community a little bit later. You know, it was really a product of my repertorial background. I started seeing a lot of kind of like nascent, I would say, stats pop up. But I started seeing some stats that, you know, there wasn't as much growth on social platforms as there had been, or the, you know, the average age was not actually increased, like it wasn't getting younger, basically, it was getting older.

6:41Sara Wilson:I started seeing these nascent stats and I thought, huh, that's interesting. I should just like keep an eye on that. Nothing, nothing was being reported in a headline. Nothing was was crazy. But I sort of started to just sniff it out. And the more I looked, the more I realized, OK, this actually is a thing. I'm not seeing the same growth on social platforms as we have in years past. And I think everyone had just assumed it would be up into the right forever. And so I started asking, well, OK, if they're not on social platforms, like, you know, where are they instead? Where are they going? And that's how I developed this thesis of, OK, I'm seeing them go to smaller, more intimate platforms like Discord, like Roblox, other gaming platforms, WhatsApp, Snapchat, DM, thinking about, OK, these are actually spaces where young audiences are hanging out and spending time and nobody's talking about it.

7:29Sara Wilson:And so that's where I came up with this term digital campfires to really encapsulate what was going on. And that is really the beginning of my shift to community and working on community with brands. OK, so when we're thinking it's just a first learning for me listening to this. Yeah. When we're thinking about where are our consumers hanging out, which is something I do with brands that I work with all the time. And Brand Growth Heroes Mini MBA and throughout the podcast episodes. But I don't mention, well, I do mention WhatsApp groups don't necessarily go into the level of detail that you've gone into.

8:00And I love this digital campfires. I had heard that expression before, but I don't think I really had visualized it in my head what it means. And you can have quite a few of them, right? As a consumer, you could have a few different ones.

8:12Sara Wilson:You can. So the way I think about it and the way I love the term because it just helps me get my head around something. So I just assume everybody loves it. And actually that it has been the case. It really helps marketers get their head around something. Okay, what's actually happening here? So I divided digital campfires up into three types, depending on the way that, you know, people were gathering at them. Okay. So the first is private messaging campfires. So that is like your WhatsApp, your Snapchat DM, all of the DM activity, okay, texting, et cetera. Private messaging campfires, number one.

8:44Sara Wilson:Number two, micro community campfires. So that'll be any sort of community, any sort of sort of smaller interactive space that happens, springs up around a interest, a belief, a passion. So I'm really into a specific type of rock climbing. Let's get together with my peeps and we're going to just get obsessive about that. So that could be in any form whatsoever, a discord, any sort of space. And then the third I call shared experience campfires. Shared experience is often stuff like gaming. so playing together you know socializing on fortnight together um watching a live stream together and so these are spaces that often express themselves in gaming not always but we're having a shared experience together and so that's how i kind of like group them and so as as i defined them in 2020 we're now what 2026 that has only exploded all of those three types of spaces are now kind of like, okay, this is very much in the present to the point that Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, a couple of months back said that Instagram DMs are the primary way people communicate on the platform.

9:56Sara Wilson:That statement was buried in like a bigger post he made and it didn't get much attention. But I was like, um, guys, this is seismic because basically it means your audience has moved into private spaces. And that's really important for marketers to know. I'm thrilled to introduce Brand Growth Heroes partner, Jolson. Jolson is a leading B Corp certified commercial law firm that specializes in guiding the founders of scaling CPG brands. With long term relationships with clients like Little Moons, Trip, Eat Natural, Bear, Graze and Pulsin, Jolson is also famous for advising the Innocent founders in their landmark sale to Coca-Cola.

10:36and believe it or not, they still work with the Innocent founders at Jamjar Investments today. I'm especially impressed by how Jolson sets founders up for long-term success and by their commitment to championing female founders. Recently, I asked Jolson managing partners Phil Hale-Smith and Paul Chappie why it's important that founders consider engaging with a commercial law firm that really understands consumer packaged goods. Ultimately, we're here to provide legal advice, But actually that legal advice is sort of irrelevant if you're not putting it into context. Thinking about how you make a consumer business, co-packing arrangements, understanding the supply chain, thinking about your sort of cost of goods.

11:17All of that is essential to ensure that we're delivering how do you actually make a business work in the consumer space from a legal point of view, but understanding the marketplace fully. And having worked with consumer brands for the last 25 years, we have a great understanding of the whole space, whether that's manufacturing, the customer, the supply chain, the branding part of it. And all of that requires some legal input as well as understanding how the parts fit together. At the end of the day, if you don't have someone that's been in the trenches day in, day out for a couple of decades, you're going to be disadvantaged.

11:55huge thanks to brand growth heroes podcast sponsors jolson now let's get back to the show so so let's talk about if i'm a brand manager marketing manager for founder and i'm thinking about how to kind of double down on this as one example so my mindset isn't um private spaces my mindset is not digital campfires my mindset's just instagram needs to look nice need to get lots of engagement on the front page need to get lots of engagement and stories based on that piece of insight and the idea of shifting my head towards this digital campfire, knowing now that that is happening in the DMs, how should I be shifting my thinking about how the role of Instagram in my driving growth?

12:35What should I be doing differently?

12:37Sara Wilson:So the first thing is thinking about how can I get inside those DMs? How can I make sure that my content is optimized to be shared? We all know that brands cannot get inside personal DMs, at least not yet. There's really interesting workarounds. We're seeing things like the close friends on Instagram where brands start actual close friends, you know, feeds, lists. Those are super interesting and I can talk about those. But the number one job as a marketer today, and actually this freaked me out when I first realized this because it was like a ding, ding, ding realization. Wait, my number one job is to get inside the DMs of my customer.

13:17Sara Wilson:That is a very different calculation than ever before. You know, it's a very different kind of like mechanism. So if my number one job is to get inside there, I really have to be thinking about prioritizing something different. And that something different is prioritizing relevance first, really being bullish on the most obsessively relevant topics and ideas and beliefs to that particular audience. And of course, we know you cannot be relevant to everybody. And so you sort of have to, it kind of forces you to get clear on who you're for, what is the message, what is it that you're trying to do, say, be, it actually forces a complete redo, like a full remodel, oftentimes, of your whole process.

14:05Sara Wilson:And that's why it can be so big and scary for marketers. That's incredible. Can you give me a little bit more detail about, first of all, why are people sharing particular? Why are they sharing one content over another? And then also, even if they share it, surely something has to happen. You know, they share it, the other person looks at it, then what? Well, let's go actually go back a few steps. Why do you share something? Like, why do you share something? Anything, not just like a piece of brand content. Sure. Like, what is it? I'm just curious. It has an emotional, quite visceral, I have an emotional, quite visceral reaction to it.

14:39I either think it's going to make someone laugh or smile, or I think it's going to elicit another reaction in somebody else's head or body. So it definitely is the fact that there's something about it that I think it's going to elicit a reaction in that person, and it is going to be highly relevant to them.

14:58Sara Wilson:That's what it is. Yeah. It's highly relevant to the other person. Yeah. Yeah, like, so I call that moment of seeing a piece of content and forwarding it, maybe not forwarding, just seeing it, the OMG, that's so me effect. I call it that the OMG, that's so me. Oh, my God, that's so me. You see yourself in a piece of content, in a moment, in a product that a brand creates. OMG, that's so me. I see more other people in content. So like I would say, oh, my God, that's so Steph. I've got to send it to Steph. Oh, my God, that's so you. Right. Right. But it's like you're seeing either yourself or somebody else.

15:33Sara Wilson:I mean, you doesn't rhyme with OMG, so I'm going to keep it as me. So it's basically a shortcut for I see myself or I see that person in this. Yeah. So I see it's like it's a spark, right? You want to spark that moment and that moment comes from being so insanely relevant to that audience. And obviously there's other factors, things like entertainment, humor is a great one. but you're kind of like that core mechanism is helping them see a part of their own identity or somebody close to them so when I talk about identity I don't just mean this in like a global like oh identity like let's talk about what identity means because in a world where everything is in digital campfire spaces or a lot of our communication is and that's where like the most important things happen identity becomes so much more important and plug specifically plugging in to your customer's core identity.

16:28Sara Wilson:So what I mean by that is identity, you wanna look for those identity seeds. So things like values, beliefs, interests, hobbies, fears, like what makes somebody who they are? And I love this because it's not the way most marketers think about their customers. Oftentimes they're thinking about them through demographics alone. But I heard a really interesting study recently from Horowitz Media Research, rather, and Vox Media, they put together the study, they did a survey of young people. And I don't remember the exact ages, but it was like solidly young Gen Z asking them, you know, how do you want to be defined versus how does like society define you?

17:10Sara Wilson:And they consistently said, everyone else is defining us by demographics, where we're from, like a Brooklynite, this and that school teacher, like demographics alone, they want to be defined through their values their interests their beliefs and tellingly the communities that they choose to be part of they said this and so if they themselves are saying define me through my values define me through my beliefs define me through my communities why are we still talking to them any other way why are we still trying to reach them any other way And so that's where communities come in and become super valuable.

17:50Sara Wilson:I call them personal identity points of entry. Pipes, I love an acronym.

17:57If this episode is inspiring you to think about new ways that you can drive growth for your business, don't forget to click follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app and even leave a review. Your small gesture has a big impact on me and my business and will be truly appreciated. it. When we had our initial call, I was saying, oh, you mean like, you know, where Vanish, Procter Gamble or Unilever or whoever set up a Facebook page about like, how do you share your tips on how to get rid of the stain on this blouse? And then, you know, everyone shares like false tips. And you were like, no, no, no, no, no.

18:31I don't mean, I don't mean brands setting up communities. I mean, brands finding ways into relevant ways into existing communities, right?

18:39Sara Wilson:Here's the thing, the big myth of community that I kind of honestly grappled with for a few years before I really decided to go hard into this space. The conversation all revolved around brands starting their own community. To your just that example, exactly. So starting a Slack channel, starting a Discord, starting a Facebook group. And I'm not against that. I think if you have a super robust existing fan base, you absolutely can do that. It's essentially a place for them to connect. and you can use that as almost like an engine of growth. That's great. But in my experience, the number of brands that can do that, have that, execute on it well, and invest on it in the way that's needed to see growth are just so few and far between.

19:24Sara Wilson:So what I see as a much more, I would say, realistic way to go about this is thinking about what are the existing communities that you really can embed into in a way that makes sense for you. And that is what I've seen brands like Poppy do really well. That is what I've seen brands like McDonald's do. Okay, talk to us about Poppy and McDonald's and what they've done. Absolutely. So I love Poppy. Everyone knows Poppy didn't start out as a multi-billion dollar company that recently got acquired by Pepsi. Okay, that's not where they started. They started in a place where a lot of brands start, which is we have this product in their case a prebiotic soda brand and we need to reach an audience they picked young women so that's a very broad swath 18 to 24 right super broad they could have gone broad they could have gone let's just show up everywhere young women are let's run tv ads whatever it might be they didn't do that they decided to embed really strategically in sororities.

20:30Sara Wilson:Sororities specifically. Why sororities? Well, sororities on campus, sororities, I actually don't know if that's a big thing in the UK. It's huge in the US. Okay. I'm from Canada. So I actually, we had sororities, but it wasn't part of my thing. So this has been a learning curve for me. Sororities are, I would call them some of the strongest repositories for identity that exists in America today. Very, very strong identity links, right? You're going to a space where all these women consider themselves part of this group. They are in this group. That is who they are. It's almost like an extension of their identity.

21:07Sara Wilson:And that stays with them for life. Think about that. You start as like a, I'm going to botch this, but like a beta phi. And then you continue on. Please don't quote me on that. But basically, it's part of their identity. So thinking about whether this was intentional on Poppy's part or not to embed an identity, that's exactly what they did. They showed up and they established relationships with these key sororities and they did it over and over and over again. It wasn't a one and done. A lot of times brands show up on campus and they show up for September and then they're gone or they show up and end of year and then they're gone.

21:42Sara Wilson:This was not a one and done. They showed up and they kept showing up and they essentially became a go-to soda on campus in very short order. And you read some of this, the impact from embedding in sororities, you know, what we saw, what the public saw was kind of like in, I think it was in 2022, Poppy sponsored a bid day. So a bid day is when you go out and actually like badge for your sorority, where you like decide they select you. It's like the culmination of the process of joining a sorority. And that moment captured on camera Poppy's like signage, but it was all done by the sororities, like felt so organic, felt like they had embraced this brand.

22:25Sara Wilson:Now call it what you will, but like that is truly what I mean by embedding into a community, defining, building a relationship with them and then watching it grow and seeing how that can create outsize impact. I have all kinds of numbers around what that did for Poppy, but ultimately the effects were so lasting that it put them on the map as a brand and brought them to the attention of one of the biggest companies in the world who eventually bought them. So I think that's a great example and a very clear one of what does it look like to embed in communities to drive growth and awareness and attention and loyalty.