Communities Outlive Products

Brand loyalty ends when the product does. Tradition loyalty can outlast it. A tradition is an experience people can repeat without you.

Athens keeps the ship of Theseus in harbour. As planks rot, they are replaced one at a time. Eventually none of the original wood is left. Is it the same ship? People have argued about it for roughly 2,000 years.

A brand is the same puzzle. Replace the product. Replace the founder. If the audience still shows up, something else was holding it together. I call that tradition.

Brand loyalty vs. tradition loyalty

Brand loyalty needs the product. When the product goes obsolete, the loyalty goes with it. Tradition loyalty needs an experience people can repeat without you, and it has no such dependency, because the fans own it.

Think of two kinds of fan. One buys the next release. The other shows up to the same event, uses the same phrases, and teaches the next person how it works. Only the first one needs you to stay in business.

What the Grateful Dead actually did

• Taping started in stealth. Before October 1984, fans smuggled recording gear into shows. That month, at Berkeley, the band approved tapers on a special ticket in a special section.
• The archive is huge. The band’s archivist, Dave Lemieux, counts more than 10,000 recordings, around 12 terabytes. At the Fare Thee Well anniversary shows, fewer than three dozen approved tapers sat in a crowd above 70,000. He described the culture as “built on this culture of sharing.”
• The community kept running. A scholarly chapter written about 15 years after Jerry Garcia died in 1995 found the taper and trader community still going. Dead & Company, a later lineup, played its final show on July 16, 2023.

Why the attachment holds

Horton and Wohl introduced the term parasocial interaction in 1956, in a paper subtitled “Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” The idea: people form one-sided bonds with figures they never meet. Reality TV is the easy example. I will be the first to admit there are shows I watch that nobody calls gold-standard television. I know the characters anyway. That is the point.

A 2023 study by Aw and Labrecque found these bonds extend to brands, and that they make people more willing to forgive a brand during a controversy. A study of fashion brand pages lists four drivers of parasocial interaction: vividness, interactivity, social presence and focused attention. Treat that as a checklist when you design a ritual.

Why it matters here: a bond to a character, a story or a ritual does not depend on a feature set. Features get replaced. Characters and rituals get passed on.

Nobody can order a community into existence, but you can set up the conditions.

• Repeat something. Same time, same place, same format. People can only build habits around things that come back.
• Give it a name. The Dead’s community has its own language. A shared word tells people they are inside.
• Open a table, not a seminar. Take finance, where I have spent some time. Banks already offer meetings with advisers, but they are booked and formal. Why not host a working group with experts? Bring your laptop, ask anything. Nobody presents. It is a table, not a pitch.
• Make accessibility the default. If you run special sessions for people with disabilities, ask why you don’t run them for everyone. A design that works for the edge case works for the room. You set a norm instead of making an exception.
• Show up in person. Events, meetups and conferences still matter. Everyone is looking for a little physical presence.

A fashion brand sells clothes. People also store them, wash them, hang them and wonder what the care label means. Most brands say nothing about any of it. A brand that teaches people to keep a jacket alive for years has a reason to be in the room long after checkout.

The question is: what is the life cycle of your product, and what are the moments around it? Travel, storage, repair and the emotions tied to each. You do not have to sell any of it. You have to care about it, visibly.

Every company says it has values. A community is where people check whether the actions match.

Designing for the day the founder leaves

A short checklist:

• Who can run the ritual if you can’t? Name two people.
• What is written down: the rules, the vocabulary, the history?
• What do only you know? Move it into the open.
• What do fans already run on their own? Leave it alone.
• If the product changed tomorrow, would the ritual still make sense?

Most brands will not have a touring culture and decades of live shows to build on. Smaller versions still work: a monthly table, a shared phrase, a yearly gathering.

One thing to try this week

Write down the one ritual your community would keep if your product disappeared tomorrow. If you can’t name one, you have found your project.

Field notes

• The care label. I can speak to anyone who has stared at a laundry label and guessed. The symbols are right there, and almost nobody can read them. A brand that taught people how to wash its clothes would earn real goodwill and a reason to talk to them again.
• The hanger. I keep thinking about a fashion brand teaming up with a hanger company to make one specialized hanger that keeps a garment’s shape. It is a silly little product. It is also a reason to start a conversation about how clothes last.