Five ways to transform planning to community centricity

For decades, marketing has been built around the same playbook which meant segmenting consumers, targeting them with messages, and fighting for their attention in crowded media environments.

In today’s fragmented world, attention is more concentrated (something I recently wrote about in a previous LinkedIn article).

People aren’t losing the ability to focus, they’re reallocating it into communities built around shared passions, problems, and identities. So, if we want to create marketing that’s both effective and responsible, we need to shift our planning lens from “audiences” to “communities.”

Here are five ways to start doing that:

1. Find a New Way to Find Your People

Traditional segmentation leans heavily on survey data and demographics: age, income, location, interests, attitudinal data. Useful, yes, but too broad to capture the real energy of a community. What defines a community isn’t what people say they like on a survey, it’s what they do together.

Communities congregate, connect, and act. That makes social platforms fertile ground for spotting them. Social listening tools can help you identify clusters of conversation, but sometimes the best method is more hands-on. Set up a burner account, dive into the hashtags, forums, and pages where your category lives, and see who’s driving the dialogue.

This bottom-up approach gets you closer to the real conversations shaping culture and closer to the communities where your brand could play a meaningful role.

2. Immerse Yourself and Explore the Edges

Once you’ve identified a community, the real work begins: getting under the skin of it. What are they talking about? What challenges are they solving for each other? What language, codes, and rituals define belonging?

Often, the richest insights come not from the mainstays of a community but from its edges. Who are the influential voices? What subgroups are emerging? These peripheral signals often reveal tensions and opportunities you won’t see from the centre.

Don’t forget not all communities live purely online. Could you attend an event, a meet-up, or a convention to see the culture firsthand? The closer you get, the more authentic your planning becomes.

This is the most important shift in mindset. Community-centric marketing starts with generosity, not extraction. If you’ve spent time listening, you’ll know the problems or tensions your community faces. The question then becomes: what value can your brand add?

3. Ask: What Can You Give This Community?

That value can take many forms. It might be saving people money, as Ziploc did when it honoured expired coupons during the cost-of-living crisis, driving both goodwill and sales. It might be solving misinformation, like Vaseline’s Vaseline Verified seal that helped consumers trust which beauty hacks actually worked. Or it might be addressing deep-rooted issues of representation, like the textured hair options introduced for Black female gamers, which boosted both representation and brand loyalty.

Not every initiative has to be “worthy.” Sometimes, communities need levity or creativity. Barilla’s “pasta playlists” - songs the exact length of time it takes to cook pasta - gave cooking fans a dose of playful escapism.

But before you act, consider your brand’s “right to play.” Is your involvement welcome and credible? Particularly with underrepresented communities, this is a step you can’t skip.

4. Conversate and Co-Create, Don’t Broadcast

Traditional marketing treats consumers as endpoints for a message. Community-centric marketing treats them as collaborators in an ongoing dialogue. That means less broadcasting, more conversation.

This could be as simple as replying to comments, celebrating what the community is doing with your product, or sharing the mic with influential voices. In other cases, it could mean building more formal systems - forums, beta tests, co-creation initiatives - to bring community feedback directly into your brand and even product NPD.

5. Measure Resonance as Well as Reach

Finally, if we’re going to change how we plan, we need to change how we measure. Reach still matters, but it looks different in a community-centric world. It’s not about a single big reach number behind one shiny asset. It’s about aggregate reach across dozens of micro-interactions as content flows through interest graphs.

More importantly, it’s about resonance. How deeply are people engaging? Are they talking about your brand in ways that show cultural relevance and trust? Social listening tools can help you track metrics like share of conversation, sentiment, or influence within a community.

The key is to balance scale with substance. A million passive views aren’t as powerful as a thousand interactions that build credibility and are amplified to the wider community.

Dig Deeper Into Communities

Community-centric planning requires us to flip our mindset. Stop chasing everyone, start mattering to someone. It means digging deeper into how people actually behave, not just who they claim to be. It means asking what we can give, not just what we can take and it means measuring resonance, not just reach.

The payoff is marketing that’s not only more effective in a fragmented landscape but also more responsible, because it creates tangible value for real people. Communities are where attention lives. If we learn to plan for them properly, they can also be where brands build lasting impact.

Please note that all opinions shared are my own in the spirit of positively moving our industry forward. Progress over perfection!

Alice Brady, Chief Strategy Officer, Responsible Marketing Advisory