The revolutionary role of customer community in your marketing strategy

I think “customer community” is one of the most misunderstood phrases in the marketing language.

On one hand, it represents the most powerful source of customer emotion and loyalty imaginable.

On the other hand, when marketers use the term, it can mean anything from a loose list of customers to a Twitter Chat. It’s probably not a customer community at all.

Yet the customer community may be one of the most essential concepts as we consider the future of marketing, and it’s worthy of deeper exploration.

The belonging crisis

There is an overwhelming need for community in our world.

A mountain of evidence suggests that the quality of our relationships has been in steady decline for decades. In the 1980s, 20 percent of Americans said they were often lonely. Now it’s 40 percent. Depression rates have increased tenfold since 1960. A study found that an epidemic of loneliness in the workplace is leading to lower job performance and less commitment to the organization, and an individual’s loneliness even influences the performance of people around them.

New research showed that more than 9 million people in the U.K. suffer from loneliness, prompting the prime minister…