Want to Build Intimacy With Customers? Get to Know Digital Campfires

Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? The grassroots effort to raise funds for research on ALS quickly went viral in 2014, when what seemed like all of your Facebook friends (and countless celebrities) posted hypershareable video clips of themselves pouring buckets of ice water over their heads. It resulted in a groundswell of local and network TV coverage and a global audience donating $220 million to the cause.

Moments like that feel almost quaint now.

Sure, social media challenges still capture eyeballs, but now they’re more likely to take the form of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it TikTok trends. Today, cultural mindshare moments are far likelier to ignite on smaller, private, and more intimate platforms like Roblox, Reddit forums, and Discord than in the public squares of traditional social ones like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. In the past year alone, hip-hop artist Lil Nas X gave a concert on gaming platform Roblox that garnered 36 million visits and has so far sold close to eight figures’ worth of merchandise; the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets fueled the GameStop stock frenzy; and a Discord server helped turn the Bored Ape Yacht Club from a relatively obscure community centered on nonfungible tokens to one now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

All three of these platforms are what I call digital campfires, a term I coined in early 2020 in Harvard Business Review to describe the smaller, often more private and interactive online communities and platforms that are trending with modern audiences. These types of platforms are especially popular among younger people — and a growing number of the creators they follow, according to a recent study. Data has repeatedly shown that younger audiences are indeed retreating from larger, more established social platforms. In the past two years, Roblox, Discord, Twitch, Fortnite, and Snapchat, along with more niche destinations like Co-Star (an AI-powered astrology platform), DePop (a fashion resale platform recently bought by Etsy), and Geneva (a small-group chat platform) have exploded in popularity, especially among Gen Z audiences. These younger consumers consistently tell researchers that they love the platforms because they’re more private, less judgmental spaces than traditional social media sites. Users feel that they can express themselves more freely and build authentic connections and friendships based on shared beliefs and interests. (Even social media behemoth Facebook seems to be embracing digital campfire principles with its recent corporate rebrand as Meta, signaling the company’s shift in focus to the metaverse — a type of shared experience campfire).

Younger audiences’ shift from traditional platforms, coupled with an array of audience and technology factors — including shortened attention spans, the notorious unreliability of ad targeting, and mobile operating system updates — have made it more expensive than ever to reach the right customers. For brands, this means that finding different ways of connecting with customers is paramount. Ideally, they build relationships with consumers first and sell to them second — which research has shown is a far more effective strategy, especially with Gen Z consumers. Since campfires are ideal vehicles for fostering intimate consumer relationships, which are fundamental for driving the trust, brand loyalty, and love required to retain customers and attract new ones, campfires have become an essential element of the marketing mix.

Some brands are going all in and making digital campfires central to their business models by hiring dedicated teams, devising custom programming, and setting targets directly tied to their bottom lines. Direct-to-consumer hormone test brand Modern Fertility, for instance, launched a digital campfire, first on Slack, then on a stand-alone platform called Circle, to provide fertility-related information as well as fertility-adjacent support on topics such as miscarriage and single motherhood to an audience well beyond its customer base. The strategy has turned the campfire into a major draw and helped build engagement, even with consumers who’d never heard of the brand. By functioning as a trustworthy source of health information and providing a forum where customers can share honest product feedback, the campfire drives both top-of-funnel awareness and customer retention. So central is the campfire strategy to the brand’s success, it has developed custom metrics to track the strategy’s impact on the business and campfire members.

Other brands are partnering with existing digital campfire platforms to build out custom experiences, such as immersive virtual worlds. Vans recently launched Vans World, an interactive skateboarding environment inside Roblox where its 47.3 million daily active users can hang out, perfect their moves, and design personalized virtual apparel and gear. The company can use data on which products users respond to most to inform future designs. Vans World thus functions both as a sales driver and highly engaged customer listening channel.

Still other brands are integrating digital campfire principles into the way they develop and market their products. Streetwear brand Market (formerly Chinatown Market) prioritizes relationships over commerce by speaking the same “language” as its audience (such as memes, cultural references, and nostalgia-driven humor), thus communicating with them as a friend would and designing products with a social feedback loop solidly in mind.

If all of this sounds overwhelming, it’s because it can be. Figuring out what it takes for your brand to successfully leverage digital campfires is a lot like learning a new language. But you have to start somewhere. The best place to begin is with an honest self-assessment to determine where your brand falls on the digital campfire continuum. To what extent does company leadership understand and prioritize campfires in its marketing strategy? What resources do you have to get your campfire off the ground? What tangible value can you provide to the campfire audience? How engaged is your audience at present, and what clues can their engagement — or lack thereof — provide about how receptive they’ll be to your efforts?

Figuring out what it takes for your brand to successfully leverage digital campfires is a lot like learning a new language. But you have to start somewhere.

Whether you decide to dive in or dip a toe in, the first thing you need to understand about digital campfires is the primary reasons people gather there: to privately message one another, connect to a microcommunity, or participate in a shared virtual experience in the metaverse. Beyond that, it helps to know the rules of the road. Here are three key steps that should be a part of every marketer’s digital campfire playbook.

1. Think Niche

It can be tempting to try to reach everyone with your marketing efforts. But brands that are successful at leveraging digital campfires to build intimacy understand that campfires are meant to cater to a smaller audience subset — one that is, by definition, more highly engaged. So the first principle in the campfire playbook is to narrow your focus.

Part of understanding this principle is knowing how campfires fit within your overall marketing mix. A digital campfire is not meant to replace a social presence but rather complement it. After all, your digital campfire and social strategies serve two different but related purposes. Whereas social media functions as a digital billboard of sorts — establishing brand awareness, driving product discovery, and helping place a brand within a broader cultural and market context — digital campfires exist to cultivate and build a core community of brand MVPs through ongoing, bespoke, and high-touch interactions.

For some brands, this means catering to their most engaged power users who evangelize for their products, share their content, and repeatedly buy what they’re selling. (Glossier, for instance, used to maintain city-specific Slack channels for this group alone.) Others simply reach a portion of their audience in a deeper way for a shorter amount of time. Take Chipotle, for example, which earlier this year launched a weeklong career fair on Discord that garnered north of 23,000 job applications — more than double the number the company usually attracts within the same time frame.

2. Put Your Audience First

Without even realizing it, marketers often put their own needs first. But as in any good relationship, it’s not all about you. That’s why you have to flip the script by viewing your end goal (attracting consumers who think you’re special and will buy what you’re selling) through your audience’s eyes. Instead of touting your brand’s unique features, provide a forum where you release an exclusive merchandise drop that’s available only to your campfire audience — that makes them feel special, which in turn drives sales. (I developed a framework to bring this concept to life.)

Another creative way brands are flipping the script is by building a digital campfire that genuinely supports its audience. Apparel brand Madhappy, whose mission is to generate inclusive conversations about mental health, cleverly leveraged the brand’s merchandise to drive virtual engagement by releasing a collection featuring a 10-digit phone number for the Local Optimist Hotline. Anyone who texts the number is connected to free mental health resources and support.

3. Maintain Trust

While gaining your audience’s trust is paramount, maintaining it over the long term also requires a thoughtful approach. Brands can build lasting trust in a variety of ways, but any successful brand draws on five basic principles, which I think of as the five C’s:

1. Caring for MVPs: Offering campfire perks, such as special gifts, virtual badges, and credits.
2. Collaboration: Providing users with opportunities for creative collaboration and learning.
3. Customization: Offering customized campfire products, services, and experiences.
4. Content moderation: Enforcing rules for engagement and/or appointing live moderators.
5. Consistency: Continually acknowledging and rewarding participants.

Spotify’s Stars program (formerly Rock Stars), a dedicated digital campfire for about 50 Spotify Community superusers from 15 countries, embodies all five C’s — especially the first, given its approach to offering perks and benefits. Among other things, the Stars answer questions in the Spotify community, respond to brand mentions on Twitter, flag potential real-time product issues, and identify customer knowledge gaps about everything from app functionality to technical limitations. In exchange, Spotify provides Stars with direct, private access to the Spotify Community team, invites them to participate in product research and beta programs, and offers them one-of-a-kind perks, such as the opportunity to attend an annual in-person event in Stockholm.

Caring for its MVPs has enabled Spotify to accomplish a variety of business goals, such as anticipating and averting user issues and negative sentiment prior to new product releases. In this sense, its digital campfire is the gift that keeps on giving because it creates a ripple trust-maintenance effect for the brand as a whole.

Indeed, leveraging digital campfires to build intimate relationships with consumers doesn’t just burnish a brand’s image. When product delays, bad press, or corporate scandals happen, a loyal digital campfire following can deflect attention from the negative publicity.

Peloton provides an example of a brand that has looked to its digital campfire community during ups and downs. In late 2019, Peloton released what came to be dubbed the “Peloton wife” ad, which featured a man giving his wife the company’s signature exercise bike for Christmas — suggesting to some that he wanted her to lose weight. Widely attacked as sexist, tone deaf, and even dystopian, the negative publicity resulted in a $1.6 billion drop in the company’s market value. But inside the company’s highly engaged private Facebook group where nearly half-a-million members regularly share posts on deeply personal topics, you would never have known there was an issue.

As the backlash raged and the company plunged headlong into crisis mode, group members proactively shared positive stories about how Peloton had affected their lives, with users describing how the company’s classes and sense of community had helped them recover from grief, trauma, depression, illness, and more. The company bounced back from the PR setback and saw incredible sales during the pandemic, but it has more recently faced challenges with a 2021 product recall and a drop in sales momentum as people have returned to gyms. The online community has stood by Peloton throughout its challenging moments, something that has not gone unnoticed by the brand. An ad campaign from earlier this year that shines light on the Peloton community points to how much the company values the trust and commitment of this digital campfire.

Navigating this new landscape for the first time can feel intimidating for companies and brand leaders, especially when the landscape and technologies are constantly changing, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. But digital campfires also present brands with unique opportunities to engage in ways that completely reinvent the standard brand-consumer dynamic while also giving them valuable new avenues for shaping their culture.

That’s why brands that fail to take digital campfires seriously do so at their peril. The companies that recognize how crucial campfires are to their future stability — and are willing to master the skills to engage and reward members and gain and maintain their trust — will reap the benefits many times over, perhaps in ways they never even imagined.