Marketers are too quick to deem things as communities. Wildfire’s Logan Jory raises the bar.
In 2025, “community” has become the marketing buzzword equivalent of “authentic”. It’s a term that has become vague, overused, and often completely misapplied.
Increasingly, the internet is full of marketers pointing at TikTok or Instagram followers and saying, “Look at this community we’ve built!” But just because someone double-taps your post or drops a fire emoji doesn’t mean they’d notice if you disappeared tomorrow. The reality is that most marketers are still confusing community with reach, attention with belonging, and engagement with meaning.
Meanwhile, spaces like Discord, where people aren’t just watching content, they’re building subcultures, are where real communities are being built. But these platforms are being overlooked for their more mainstream cousins.
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The communities are there (we specialize in finding them), but brands are still making the same mistakes. This fundamentally comes back to a misunderstanding of what the term community means.
These are the five biggest misconceptions holding brands back from building (or accessing) actual communities - the kind that can’t be bought, faked, or spammed into submission.
1. Confusing followers with members
A million TikTok followers?
Great. Well done, you. But that’s an audience, not a community. Audiences watch. Communities participate. They’re not passive. They stop the scroll and get involved.
If someone watches your video for three seconds and moves on with their day, they’re not part of anything. Community also requires a shared identity. It’s where people talk to each other, and not just about you. If there’s no dialogue, no norms, no real sense of belonging, then you’ve built a feed, not a forum.
Stop mistaking scale for substance.
2. Mistaking engagement for belonging
Brands love engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares. The marketing team fills its reports with them. Brand managers are happy because there are lots of big numbers to show the board. “Look,” they say, “Big numbers. ROI.”
Unfortunately, though, a comment doesn’t mean someone cares. They could be a troll. Or just looking for an argument for the sake of it. They’re not there to add to the conversation in a valuable way. They don’t care about the “community”.
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Belonging looks different. On Discord, someone actively seeks out and joins a server, verifies themselves, navigates channels, and actively chooses to engage. Not because an algorithm served them content, but because they actively sought it out. The intent means there is value. Our data gathered through delivering campaigns with Discord communities shows that when it comes to brand lift it outperforms other social platforms by a considerable margin - on average, by over 50%.
3. Dropping in, not showing up
Too many brands treat communities like billboards: show up, post, vanish. But communities don’t work like that. They’re intimate, with rules, gatekeepers, a unique but recognized tone and norms that everyone follows. As a brand, if you don’t bring something to the table, be that content, access, conversation, or even just respect, you will get called out. Quickly.
You don’t walk into someone’s house and shout, “Buy our product!” without being asked to leave. Communities are no different. You need to show up with something that answers the unspoken question: “Why is this here, and what’s in it for us?”
Bring value, or don’t bother turning up.
4. Thinking you have to build one
You don’t need to build a community. That’s like deciding to build your own football team instead of sponsoring one.
The internet is already full of thriving, high-intent communities. On Discord, Reddit for example, there are fandom servers, gaming clans, anime hubs - they’re already talking, sharing, and bonding over the exact stuff your brand cares about. You just need to find the right ones and earn your way in.
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So let go of the ego. You don’t need to be the owner; you just need to get involved in the right way.
5. Misusing the word “authentic”
It’s a word that makes me shudder. It’s also a word that I’ve probably used a thousand times, which makes me shudder even more. It’s the last refuge of every brand trying to sound like they get it. But if you have to say it’s authentic, it probably isn’t.
“Authentic” isn’t a USP. It’s just you. Especially in closed communities, where one whiff of cringe will get you roasted in real-time. People in these spaces don’t just scroll past things that feel off; they push back, often anonymously, and often hard. And often in an amusing way. So it pays to do it right with a specialist who understands different communities.
That’s why true community activations have to be collaborative. You work with community managers (these are the internal tastemakers) to get the tone right. Otherwise, you will come across like Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock:
TL;DR: You’re probably doing community wrong.
If you’re still measuring community in impressions, comments or follower counts, you’ve missed the point. Community isn’t a channel or a campaign. It’s about relationships.
And those relationships can’t be faked.