Instead of a single, expensive brand event, Curious Elixirs orchestrates a night where hundreds of customers host their own parties nationwide. The brand simply provides product, letting the community create authentic, diverse, and highly-shareable experiences that scale brand awareness organically.
Related Insights
Ty Haney, founder of Outdoor Voices, reveals a key community-building step: relinquish brand control. By empowering super fans to host local events, the brand turns them into 'co-owners' of the experience. This generates more authentic engagement and word-of-mouth than centrally-managed marketing ever could.
Gary Vaynerchuk observes that brands are now treating major events like the Super Bowl as efficient production opportunities. Instead of just hosting parties, they leverage influencers and on-site activations to generate a high volume of social content, maximizing ROI on expensive experiential marketing.
To scale her personal brand-centric community, Chanel Clark identifies hyper-engaged members in different cities. These "power users," who embody the community's vibe, are empowered as local chapter leads, allowing the founder's ethos to scale without her needing to be physically present at every event.
By empowering ambassadors to host local events, Outdoor Voices turned passive fans into active co-owners. This gave events authentic authorship, making them more powerful for attendees and creating a self-perpetuating flywheel of community growth and brand loyalty.
Sprout Social amplifies its event presence by sponsoring community-led micro-events and dinners co-hosted with creators during major conferences like INBOUND. This strategy leverages the creator's audience to attract a curated group, piggybacking on existing industry buzz for greater impact.
Transform your customer base into a community by hosting exclusive meetups. This strategy builds a "culture machine" where customers feel like family, fostering loyalty and generating organic referrals without a hard sales pitch.
In an AI-driven world, "scaling the unscalable" creates a competitive edge. Host intimate, in-person events like local dinners or meetups. The primary ROI is not direct sales but filming the interactions to create a powerful engine for authentic, high-performing social media content that can be distributed globally.
Brands maximize the ROI of expensive activations like those at the Super Bowl by reframing them as 'production days.' Instead of a one-off event, they become content engines for social media and creative campaigns, using influencers and programming to reach a much broader audience.
Instead of focusing on immediate ROI, structure events to foster genuine connections and goodwill ("karma"). This builds a stronger, more resilient brand over time, even if it means creating opportunities for competitors by inviting them.
The 'Yoga with Adrian' live tours grew to venues with thousands of attendees, such as Red Rocks. A key component of this success was the organic meetups happening before the events, where fans who connected in the online community would arrange to meet in real life for the first time, amplifying the event's energy.
